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2 pointspadjosh6 comments

Hey folks, getting ready to launch a group social discovery/dating website and wanted your input, suggestions, comments, etc. You can access a test beta of the site at the following address:

http://www.planadrink.com/user

The basic premise of the site is to make meeting new people through the internet easier, more comfortable and fun. Currently, most socializing/dating websites focus on a one on one meeting which can be very uncomfortable. We think the best way to meet new people is in the company of your close friends. The vision we have incorporates your already established "social circle" in meeting new friends and potential dating partners online and in reality.

Our goal is to concentrate on making matches through real life group social activities. We we will be providing the medium of establishing new potential successful connections by offering a complete group social interaction and discovery experience.

Our website interface is simple and direct:

1. Sign-up and create a brief profile.

2. Add/Invite a maximum of 6 close friends to your circle that you normally socialize with.

3. Start meeting new circles in your area!

It's not clear as a first-time visitor what this site does. Why not have a simple header like: "Have a drink with ________ at ___________?" Suggest something I want to do that will justify giving you my email address?

More pedantic notes on design:

(1) There is far too much text in general and the font is too small.

(2) Profile spacing is really bad. Top/bottom whitespace is not symmetrical and photos don't have equal padding on all sides. Profile content also crowds far-left, leaving a huge swathe of whitespace in the center of your webpage.

(3) Remove the text telling people they can't signup unless they're in New York. You will need all of your visitors to test the attractiveness of your splash page and iterate towards something that is more viral.

(4) There are too many signup boxes. Your signup box is your notification box. And you should remove it until someone asks to signup. Let a single button trigger a lightbox that asks for no more than someone's email address and location. Mail them their password.

(5) Telling people to go through the work of creating an account, filling out their profile, inviting friends, and browsing stranger profiles is not telling them how the service works. It is telling them to go away and never come back.

(6) The color red really jumps off the page. Using it for the signup button is smart. Using it more than once is less smart, especially since the first red profile button overshadows your signup button in visual hierarchy, and then the remaining buttons undermine the signup button by pulling my attention downwards and away.

(7) There is a lack of design consistency in user profiles. Some have signatures and some don't. Quite seriously, why don't you just put a number of photos there so you maximize the chance of me seeing someone I find attractive?

(8) If you want me to invite my friends, there has to be a non-weird reason for why I would do this.

Intended as constructive feedback. Good luck!

Thank you for the great feedback, much appreciated. I see where you are coming from with a lot of your points and we definitely have some improvement to make on the design/user sign up.

A few things I noticed after a brief look:

Your blog still has the starter Wordpress post in it. I understand if it isn't finished yet, but you should remove the link to it until it is.

It wasn't immediately apparent to me that this site's hook was getting entire groups of people together. The tagline sort of hinted at it ("Have your people meet my people") but I still didn't know if this was a standard one on one matchmaking site. It'd get the point across better if you showed entire circles of people on the landing page, not just one member.

js_startup - Thanks for the comments. What you mentioned about showing the entire circle was being thrown around between my partner and I. Will definitely take that into consideration.

Approximately 1/3 of images of the profiles have an iStockphoto watermark. They look like fake profiles. http://imgur.com/q5Pbh

gus - That's because they are...the site isn't launched yet we are just testing everything. All of those will be removed when we start to roll out the site to the public.

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