The first thing you’ll notice when using the application is its icon.  Often times, companies think of their app icon as an afterthought.  The icon is THE way people first experience an application and because of that, the design team took extra care in building the icon for eHarmony HD.  The icon features a detailed, leather-bound book with an inlaid eHarmony stone.  It looks very touchable and hopefully is a great indication to you that you’re about to use something special.

Getting Started

When the app first opens, you arrive at the desktop, where you can register, take our tour, or login (if you already have an account).  The registration form is not our normal registration form.  You’re about to start a journey with our service, so why not start with a personal letter from you to us, telling us who you are and who you’re looking for.  If you have questions about our service, click on the tour and swipe through a quick, elegant 5-slide overview about the experience.  You notice that the tour features rich photography.  We used it because we thought it be a more enjoyable way to showcase the experience.  Before you move on, there’s actually one more thing you can interact with on this screen.  It’s something that the design team put in as a fun bit of polish, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.  I will give you a hint though: there’s nothing like starting your day off with a hot beverage from Starbucks.

After you sign up, our famous eHarmony Relationship Questionnaire(RQ) begins. The RQ is an important part of the eHarmony process.  It’s how we learn about you and whom you’re looking for.  Over the years, the RQ has also been a great mechanism to filter out less serious people who are only signing up to see photos and that have no intention of trying to find a great relationship.  Like the iPhone, in eHarmony HD, we utilize a “book” format in that, the entire RQ is taken from within a blue eHarmony RQ book.  It’s easy to complete.  Just touch the answers to the questions shown on a page, then swipe to the next page, just like you would if you were reading a real book.

You’ll be done sooner than you realize, and you will arrive at the Activity Feed.  It’s impossible to have a great experience on our service without a great profile, which means telling your matches about yourself and posting some photos.  Since you don’t have any Match Activity yet, let’s go ahead and touch the My Profile label in the bottom navigation.

Building your profile

The table rotates to your profile.  We use animation throughout the experience in a non-gratuitous way to help you focus on the activity in front of you. When you arrive at the Profile Editing screen, you’ll see your profile as it appears to other eHarmony HD members.  At this point, it’ll likely be looking a little sparse, so let’s get to work.  Just touch a question or a field, and it becomes immediately editable.  Type away, and when you’re done. Don’t forget to save your changes!

Adding a photo, or two, or three, or twelve(!) is also easy.  If you’re on an iPad 2 you have three ways to add a photo, but if you’re on the original iPad you have only two:

1)      Add a photo from your library – just pick an album and then select the photos you want.

2)      Add a photo from Facebook – login with your Facebook ID and we’ll display your Facebook photo albums.  Pick your photos and we’ll handle the rest.  Don’t worry, we will NOT post anything to your wall.

3)      Take a photo using your iPad’s camera (iPad 2 only) – it’s simple.  Pose, snap your photo, crop it and then save it.

Remember, if you have more photos posted, you tend to get more communication, so add at least a few if you can.  It’s also great practice to periodically add new photos.

It’s all about YOU

After you’re done here, let’s get to know you, the real you, a little better.  Touch the Personality Profile label in the bottom navigation.  This brings up your Personality Profile.  The team had this innovative idea: since you completed our RQ book when you signed up, it only made sense that we’d give you a personalized book in return.  So we named your report “The Book of You”.  The Book of You is our 5 factor analysis of your personality, and it’s based on decades of psychological research.  We wanted to make the experience a pleasure to read (it’s important stuff), so the pages are laid out for great readability, and support swiping for easy page turning.

Now, go back to the Match Activity page. Click on the “Learn More” sticky under your picture.  This takes you to our subscription page.  Here, you can pick the plan you’re interested in by grabbing a sticky from the bottom area and dragging it to the open space on the right side.  Enter your address, and click confirm, and your subscription is instantly billed to your iTunes account.  One thing to keep in mind – if you don’t find a plan that works for you, you can always visit us onsite at www.eharmony.com, where we have even more plans available.

Let’s look at some matches!

Now that you’ve subscribed, let’s visit the My Matches area.  You should have matches by now, so let’s take a look.  Like our main site, you’re My Matches page is organized into three tabs:

• New – these are newly delivered matches or matches that you’ve viewed but have yet to take action on
• Communicating – these are matches that you are currently communicating with
• Archived – these are matches that you’ve opted to not pursue at this time

Your matches on any tab are displayed in a view that the team nicknamed “Baseball Card” view.  Each match’s photo appears on a Polaroid with their name and location.  To see all of your new matches, just swipe to the right, and your matches will smoothly fly by.  To support this view, we’re really taking advantage of the processing power of the iPad, and it’s a refreshing way to view your matches.  It’s something that we just wouldn’t have been able to do very easily on any other platform.

One other feature that we’ve included on this page is the ability to Archive or Close matches in bulk.  It’s something a many customers have been asking us for, so we’re happy to be providing it now.  To bulk Archive any of your new matches, just click on the Archive button in the top left corner, and you’ll see the match polaroids go into the famous iOS “jiggly mode”.  Just click on the x’s, click the Archive button again, and then all of your selected matches are sent to your Archive tab.

See someone you’re interested in?  Go ahead and click on him.  The match’s polaroid navigates upwards and is placed in his respective dossier, where you can learn more about him.  With the match profile page, our team set about creating an experience that would help our customers make a deep connection with their matches.  So instead of just a straight text experience all the way down the profile, you’ll see elements like photos and common interests (Something to Talk About) sprinkled throughout the body of the profile.  The team created one of the most distinctive profiles in our industry, and based on usability testing, the design helps you to better connect with your matches.  It accomplishes this because you’ll find that this layout actually gets you to read the entire profile.

Ready for your close up?

Stunning photography is often used to indicate an elegant experience.  In our case it also helps also helps you to really connect with your matches.  eHarmony HD features some of the biggest photos of ANY dating site.  Click on the match’s photo in the top left corner and it opens up our dedicated photo browser.  You can browse all of your match’s photos just by swiping left or right or you can use the Photo Strip controller, found in the top right corner.  To really see your match, touch the middle of the photo, and all of the navigational elements disappear, leaving nothing between you and your match.  Talk about a connection!

Let’s talk!

Once you’re done viewing his photos and ready to start the conversation, touch the Send Message button, found under the main profile picture.  The communication module slides out.  Just like the site, you can choose between two forms of communication:

1. Guided Communication – eHarmony’s 4-step process that’s geared towards new customers or people new to online dating in general
2. eHarmony Mail – anonymous email

If you need more help with communication, touch the Learn More button to reach the more detailed tutorial.  As you read the tutorial, sharp eyes will notice another fun Easter egg that the design team included in the interface.

Can you hear me now?

Most apps on the iPad outside of games typically do not include sound.  It’s for good reason – it’s hard to do in a way that’s not annoying.  As we were beta testing this app, we had a friend of eHarmony, who works on sound editing for famous TV shows like Mad Men and The Sopranos, convince us to add sound.  His point was that the application we had built was experiential and sound could only help to improve a customer’s comprehension.  So he helped us to add subtle sound effects throughout the experience such as when the table rotates, when you delete items on your Activity Feed, when you touch any button, and more.

More Help and Feedback

The last things we want to mention are in the area of help and feedback.  On any page in the experience, if you ever get stuck, just touch the “i” in the lower right corner of the screen, and select tutorial.  This brings up the blueprints for the current page you’re on.  The blueprint will contain instructions on how the page works.

Finally, while we’ve worked long and hard on this project, we’re still open to feedback.  If you love it, if you hate, if you have suggestions – WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!  Just touch “Send Feedback” and you can send us a note directly.  Know that we can’t answer every email personally, but we’ll always read and share them amongst the team.

On behalf of the entire company, we want to thank you for trying eHarmony HD.  We hope it leads to an amazing first date and then some.

The post eHarmony HD for iPad appeared first on eHarmony Blog.

As we looked at the version 1 releases for our mobile products, we saw them as providing our customers with a solid, functional experience. You could complete any of the critical onsite actions that you needed to, now on the go.

However, as we were nearing the end of our planning for the 1.0 wave, the product and design teams wanted to take a step back and really think about what a next generation eHarmony experience might look like on mobile. This became especially important as Apple had released the first generation of the iPad and it shattered all expectations about mobile and tablet computing.

So we asked ourselves, “What if we completely re-imagined what our service looked like from a visual ID and interaction perspective?”

We set about answering that question during the creation of our new eHarmony HD iPad application.
We started by reexamining the core of what eHarmony is, and what people all over the world see in our brand. Looking back over the years, through all the customer research and success couple interviews, there were a few terms that kept coming up over and over again — Warm, Real, and Elegant. We felt that those particular adjectives represented the core of what our eHarmony web experience strives to be, and these were terms that had the ability to illicit strong feelings in our customers.

So our design and product teams partnered with an outside design shop called JacksonFishMarket, and we wrestled with these basic questions: How do you build an experience that makes our customers actually feel something when they use it? How can you build an eHarmony experience that is Warm, Real and Elegant?

When we thought about “warm” experiences outside of software, one experience jumped to mind – Starbucks. Beyond being a place where countless couples go on their first dates, Starbucks has created an incredibly warm and inviting environment, no matter the store, no matter the country. When you enter a store, you are surrounded by warm colors and great lighting; the baristas always greet you with a smile and are sure to learn your name before making your drink. And when they make you your drink, they will literally make you whatever you want. In short, you feel great and welcome while you’re there.

In our experience, we tried to capture the same feeling through our color choices, fonts and voice. In a sea of blue dating sites, we opted to go with a color palette that used natural or earth tones. Where possible, we used handwritten fonts and our tone/voice is more informal – making you feel like we’re having a conversation with you and you alone. We also made sure to be there whenever our customers need assistance, while remaining unobtrusive for our more experienced customers. For instance, a new user will notice how we gently inform and remind them of the importance of a complete profile throughout their first week on the service. We don’t constantly harass them, but every few logins, we’ll ask them to complete one bite-sized element of their profile.

For our next value, “real”, we thought it would be a bit easier to translate into a software experience. The idea of being real or authentic is at the core of all of our creative and brand imagery. We use real success couples in our ads and even strive for a straightforward tone in the voiceover talent we use. So, our team made a design choice to use real items throughout the experience, because real items are things that people ascribe value to versus just pixels on a screen. So in our new iPad HD experience, you’ll see things like Polaroids, folders, and ink throughout. All of these items are found on a natural, comfortable desktop experience; one in which hope our customers would feel right at home.

The form factor also comes into play here. It’s no secret that the iPad is a wonderful device for consuming digital books. It feels natural to swipe through the pages of book when reading an iBook on the device. And so, we transformed core elements of the user experience, the Relationship Questionnaire and the Personality Profile, into a digital “book” experience. As you use those two features, you’re literally turning pages of a digital book, but it all feels incredibly realistic because it’s all second-nature when you’re using an iPad.

Finally, there are lots of elegant or premium software experiences out there. Companies like Apple or Tiffany’s come to mind when you ask people about elegant web experiences. Those experiences tend to be clean and simple and make use of high end materials in their interfaces like metal, glass or chrome. Trouble is, being elegant or high end can often lead to experiences that feel cold and clinical – doesn’t exactly put you in the right mood to find love. But, many times, very personalized or handcrafted experiences can also be thought of as elegant and high end. For example, think about how receiving a handwritten letter makes you feel versus receiving an email. One’s obviously more personal and more elegant than the other.

So with our final design goal, we set about making this application feel like a very personalized, very simple experience versus a run-of-the-mill-dating search and browse experience. We started by using materials in the interface that would really convey personalization — parchment paper, bamboo, handwritten notes and script fonts. We added a layer of sound effects and animation to help members comprehend key action points. We then simplified and cut down the experience to its most minimal incarnation so that everything was easy to find and easy to use. And of course, we made it all look fantastic! The experience features big, beautiful photos of your matches and one of the most stunning layouts of a user profile in our industry.

So now that you understand the rationale behind our design choices. In our next post, we’ll show you why this version of eHarmony is our best experience yet. Stay tuned to see what we built!

The post Keeping it Real, Warm and Elegant – eHarmony’s Newest Design Challenge appeared first on eHarmony Blog.

We’ve been told by our customers that one really useful thing to know about a match would be their level of activity on the site. Having this information helps our customers prioritize who to communicate with now versus who to communicate with later. You spoke, we listened.

Very shortly, all eHarmony subscribers will notice, when looking at a match (right next to the match’s name actually), a stamp that shows the approximate time frame when that match was last on the site. You will see last login times broken down into the following increments:

• Today
• Yesterday
• Within the last week
• Within the last two weeks
• Over three weeks ago

As you look at your newly delivered matches, you’ll quickly notice that they are in most cases as “active” as you. Hopefully that’ll give you or your match the confidence to take the next step and start communicating. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this new enhancement, as well as your overall experience on our service.

The post New Feature – “Active Within” Tells You When Your Matches Were Last on the Site appeared first on eHarmony Blog.

Although there is no perfect formula for finding love on any dating site, I do want to share some trends we’ve uncovered for users who get above-average profile activity, more communication and seem to find that special somebody much earlier in the process.

If you want to really increase your chances for success on eHarmony, we recommend doing the following:

1. You need photos.
You might be surprised to learn that nearly 35% of users on eHarmony don’t upload a photo. We know that users who have at least one photo increase their chances of finding someone by almost 100%. (Seriously!)

We’ve found that users who have at least three great photos (what defines a great photo?) almost always meet someone they want to get to know better.

2. Answer Profile Questions, but be yourself.
This seems like a given right? Well, if you’ve been on eHarmony you’ve most likely come across profiles that have very little substance to them. We know for a fact that users who answer at least five profile questions and answer them in a more one-to-one conversational tone see an increase in both received “Smiles” and incoming messages from their matches.

We’re working to revise some of the profile questions to make them more fun to answer and more interesting to read.

3. Don’t be shy about sending a Smile to a match.
Smiles are just a fun way of saying “Hi,” and helping to break the ice with your matches. We’ve found that users who send smiles to their matches tend to end up meeting someone much faster than users who don’t.

4. Consider expanding your match distance settings.
We all hope that our prince or princess is right down the street, but typically you meet matches who are not within your immediate location. This is especially true if you live in more suburban and rural areas.

Try expanding your distance settings (http://www.eharmony.com/singles/servlet/mysettings) and you’ll immediately start receiving new matches. We recommend setting your distance settings to more than 120 miles from you.

You may think, “Who wants to date someone who lives 120 miles away?” but look at it this way. If there is a person who is deeply compatible with you, is ready for a committed relationship, and lives 101 miles away, don’t you want to know it? Isn’t that distance something that you can overcome on your way to a long-term relationship? We’ve seen it happen thousands of times.

So there you have it. The four most important things you can do right now to improve your chances for finding that special someone. We’ll continue to share our findings and help you use eHarmony more effectively.

Be yourself, be honest and have fun! The world can literally be at your fingertips.

The post eHarmony Success in Four Steps appeared first on eHarmony Blog.

Until now, you could only access your Personality Profile when logged into our main site. But now, with the latest version 1.5 release of our iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android mobile apps, you can now read your report while on the go.

The Book of You
When you open the eHarmony mobile app on your iPhone, iPod Touch or Android device, you’ll now find a link to the Personality Profile right on the Home screen. Your report is organized in a book format to make the experience both an interesting and easy read. We encourage you to take a look and see if you don’t learn something valuable about yourself.

Subscribe and Communicate Right from Your Phone
Another new feature in this release is the ability for our US customers to subscribe right from their iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android mobile device. It’s handy to be able to upgrade your account to subscriber status while you’re on the go, especially when you have a match that really wants to get to know you. We support all major credit cards (sorry no Paypal yet), and have a number of plans that can work for most any budget. And if you prefer to talk to one of our customer care agents to complete your subscription, that option is still available.

iPad Bug Fix
Also in this release, we’ve fixed a bug for our iPad app which was forcing our iPad users to log-in again after viewing each match’s photos. Being candid, everyone in QA, Engineering and Product was disappointed that we missed that specific bug. Over the last few releases we’ve been steadily improving the stability and performance of our mobile applications, despite this bug. We want all of our customers to know that our team is focused on continually improving the mobile experience and then when bugs do make it into the wild, we’ll do our best to put out a fix as quickly as we can.
As always, if you have any questions or comments on our new features, please let us know by posting a comment on this blog article. We look forward to hearing from you!

The post eHarmony’s Personality Profile – Now Mobile appeared first on eHarmony Blog.

The Relationship Questionnaire kicks off the entire eHarmony process. It helps us get to know you—and, most importantly, what qualities you want in a romantic partner. Every night, we use this information to find you your new matches. It’s a really important part of our service to get right.

A new experience for mobile devices

Bringing the eHarmony questionnaire to mobile devices offered a clean slate to think about how we could improve this experience for our members. It’s one of the aspects of our service that generates the most feedback, so we definitely wanted to take those comments into consideration. On the one hand, the questionnaire needs to capture all of the information that lets us make good matches for our members, but on the other we felt that people would only spend so long going through the questionnaire on a three- to four-inch screen.

Our teammates in R&D and Matching were a huge part of making this experience better. They are constantly experimenting with new questions and matching models to improve the quality of the matches our system makes for each member. For quite some time, they have been working on a way to dramatically reduce the number of questions we need to ask while still enabling us to deliver high-quality matches. They recently figured out a way to maintain a great matching experience while only asking 100 questions. (Although it gets even more refined if/when people complete the full questionnaire.)

We also realized early on in our process that the touch interface of a mobile app would be a great way to interact with our questionnaire. Most of the questions we need to ask are numeric value questions (“on a scale of 1-7 tell us…”) or list questions (“pick X choices from this list”). Those question types lend themselves very well to touch. In fact, one of our goals was to bring up the onscreen keyboard a minimum number of times (we got it down to 10 times through the entire mobile Relationship Questionnaire experience).

But even with touch, we didn’t want to the questionnaire to become quickly tiresome. So we added an auto–advance feature to move you to the next question without an extra touch, as well as an auto-save capability so you can easily complete the questionnaire in multiple sessions if you choose. These are quick and subtle ways to make getting started on eHarmony using mobile as easy as possible.

Dear eHarmony…

The other major change we’re introducing makes the Relationship Questionnaire feel more personal. Our mobile apps offer a way to try out a different way to bring customers into our service.

As we brainstormed different organizational concepts for the questionnaire, the metaphor of a book seemed to make a lot of sense, and here’s how we structured it:

The questionnaire is divided into logical chapters that each begin with an overview of why we ask certain types of questions. So whether you’re answering questions about your personality, or completing questions that will go towards filling out your profile, or even completing your match settings, you will have more insight into why we’re asking these questions and how they’ll be used.

Some of the questions have also been re-phrased into first-person statements. If you can picture yourself actually saying these statements, it should help you answer them more accurately.

Finally you’ll see helpful and encouraging messaging sprinkled throughout the experience to help you keep going.

Best of all, if we detect that an answer you’re providing may severely restrict the number of matches you’ll get, we’ll let you know right then and there so you can make the decision intentionally rather than inadvertently.

We hope that you find that our new mobile questionnaire is an easy and engaging way to get started using eHarmony. If you have feedback on it, please submit a comment to the blog. We’re listening and we’re always interested in hearing how we can make your experience on eHarmony even better.

The post eHarmony Introduces New Mobile Relationship Questionnaire appeared first on eHarmony Blog.