by Joe Tracy, Publisher of Online Dating Magazine
American Singles has announced that it has upgraded the look of its service through the release of a newly redesigned Website. I logged into American Singles to take a peek and while the site looks much the same, the navigation and visual simplicity has improved dramatically, which is a great thing. But even with this redesign, American Singles has missed some key opportunities to improve its service.
The most popular online dating services know that when someone signs up and selects "Man Seeking Woman", he doesn't want to see men returned in his searches. And as a Man Seeking Women, I don't care for other men to be viewing my profile. American Singles has had this problem for years through its "Members Online" option. While poking around at their changes (the setting on my profile is Man Seeking Woman") I selected "Members Online" and up popped 8 men and four females. Men can view me, initiate chats with me, flirt with me. This is a huge problem for American Singles. From smaller dating services, you would expect this. From American Singles it is an embarrassment and a key turnoff for using the service despite them having many awesome features.
American Singles has done a good job of "cleaning up" its look. The site as a whole is visually pleasing after their changes. Now hopefully American Singles will evolve in the area of functionality, like getting rid of the ability of men to view men only seeking women and women to view women only seeking men.
I did notice a feature change in American Singles. In its default settings, the service took away the ability for members to delete their appearance as having viewed someones profile. In American Singles, you can see who has viewed you, but you used to also have the ability to delete yourself from appearing in someone else's Who's Viewed You folder even if you had viewed them. I liked this feature. Now the good news for those who are using the service is that the option is there; just more hidden. By default when you click "Members You've Viewed" the results show up in a "gallery-type" listing. There's plenty of room for American Singles to put a "delete" option, but for whatever reason they didn't. The trick is to change your format. Click the "View as List" button at the top of the listings and it goes to the more traditional American Singles listing method that still has the option to "delete from list". *whew* :-)
Two of the keys to succeeding in the online dating industry are a strong PR/Marketing presence (i.e. Match and eHarmony) and continual evolution of your service. It's nice to see American Singles has upgraded its look. Hopefully we'll see some changes that improve the functionality of an already nice service with just a few rough edges.
Comments