Bharat Matrimony's Matrimony 2.0 Website and User Experience Issues
I am a member of Bharat Matrimony.com. Today I received an email from them saying they have launched a Next Generation Matrimony 2.0 site portal which focuses on user-experience and other enhancements. Naturally that creates a lot of curiosity with every User Experience engineer to see what is in for a 2.0 matrimonial site portal.
So I logged in and.. saw a more white-spaced but the same green themed website. Certainly there are number of improvements compared to the previous site design. The new site features good-readability (keeping in mind that more than 40% of their users would be more than 45 years old parents), good AJAX implementations to provide on-the-spot responses. Simple and clear reporting about the messages (sent and received) interests (sent and received) profile completeness etc.
Regarding user-experience, I believe this new design is much better than the previous one. Though the navigation and few other things like layout may take some time to get used to. This, I believe is a have-to-live problem with every User Interface re-designs. But I hope the time taken for understanding this new UI is very less.
I haven't gone through the site fully. But one thing I noted is, when you click on the Personalized messages, they show only one message first. To read the next or all other messages, one has to click the tiny transport links on the top right corner which is a bad usability. I have 7 messages to respond. But only one message was shown. I was searching for a navigation/action button to read the next or all messages. After a few seconds, I thought "oh boy looks like I have only one message to respond to". The user experience is worse here. A user would like to read all the 7 messages and not one message at a time. Bharatmatrimony.com should have shown snapshots of all 7 messages at a single glance here.
Anyway, hope those guys at Bharatmatrimony.com corrects this UI issue and work towards enhancing the user-experience.
- Rajesh Sundaram
So I logged in and.. saw a more white-spaced but the same green themed website. Certainly there are number of improvements compared to the previous site design. The new site features good-readability (keeping in mind that more than 40% of their users would be more than 45 years old parents), good AJAX implementations to provide on-the-spot responses. Simple and clear reporting about the messages (sent and received) interests (sent and received) profile completeness etc.
Regarding user-experience, I believe this new design is much better than the previous one. Though the navigation and few other things like layout may take some time to get used to. This, I believe is a have-to-live problem with every User Interface re-designs. But I hope the time taken for understanding this new UI is very less.
I haven't gone through the site fully. But one thing I noted is, when you click on the Personalized messages, they show only one message first. To read the next or all other messages, one has to click the tiny transport links on the top right corner which is a bad usability. I have 7 messages to respond. But only one message was shown. I was searching for a navigation/action button to read the next or all messages. After a few seconds, I thought "oh boy looks like I have only one message to respond to". The user experience is worse here. A user would like to read all the 7 messages and not one message at a time. Bharatmatrimony.com should have shown snapshots of all 7 messages at a single glance here.
Anyway, hope those guys at Bharatmatrimony.com corrects this UI issue and work towards enhancing the user-experience.
- Rajesh Sundaram
Comments
Thanks for your feedback. Glad to see that you liked the new design of Bharatmatrimony.com.
Assure you that we will continuously be working on improving the usability of the site and feedback from customers like you will definitely help us.
Thanks once again.
I wish to make some clarifications on your blog.
1) It is not 'Next Generation 2.0', it is 'Matrimony 2.0'. Kindly check the mailer once again.
2) Please make a note that Bharatmatrimony is a 'Portal' and not a simple 'website'
3) Matrimony 2.0 is a term coined & implemented by Bharatmatrimony and this also copied by its competitor.
4) The term Matrimony 2.0(business model) derives some characteristics of web 2.0 concept since there is more white-space.
5) Your opinion on reading the Personalized messages is not correct, because you have tried to read the Personalized messages from the 'My Home' page(the screen-shot clearly shows it), if you want to see all the seven messages at a glance kindly click the 'Messages' on the top navigation which allows you to read upto 10 messages in a page.