Case Study - Online Dating
Application: Online Dating Website
Industry: Friendship & Dating
Aim: To design a dating website that matches the profile of one user with the other and creates an interactive interface for site members.
Background: An online Dating agency approached us in pursuit of a website focusing on people looking for like minded friends and relationships with the opposite sex. The website had to provide its members with dating related data and enhance user engagement through interactive features like profile votes, message boards and chat features.
Admin had to have over-riding control on all features and pages of the website to ensure that there are no "wrong" people on the website.
Objectives: The core objectives before our development team were :
- To design an application for the administrator to allow him to have a complete control over the website without any hassles
- Design and develop a profile matching feature which produces results of high relevance
- Provide user engagement features to increase time spent on the site by members
- Generate the appropriate matches quickly and efficiently
Solution: Our development team took up the challenge and designed a website which not only accomplished the above objectives but also made it easier for the young to find a perfect match. This was done by introducing certain applications like chat features, mailboxes and accurate search. The most important features of the website are:
- an in-depth and informative profile matching process
- the design allows the user to communicate easily with the potential match
- the users can also report the objectionable profiles and content
Technical Background:
Technologies Used:
PHP 4.0 and MySql on the server-side.
HTML, DHTML and Java Script on the client-side.
Features:
The site has 4 broad types of users – admin, casual visitors, free members and premium members.
Site Administrator: Admin area has been divided into three levels (1, 2, 3). Access to the features & function of admin area depend upon the level assigned.
Casual Visitors: Free Members or Premium members are site visitors with some special privileges. Visitor without these privileges can:
- View the 5 most voted Singles displaying on home page
- Search singles for dating & friendship
Free Members: These members don’t have access to only the basic features and do not have access to interactive features like voting, viewing contact info or chat.
Premium Members (Paid Members): Premium members have access to all the features on the dating website. These include:
- View profile details of other members, if he/she is a registered user. A click on the image of the match lets the user to view all the related information of that user.
- Advanced Search – These members can do a quick search on the basis of age, location, photo availability etc. to locate the desired profile and can also save the results for future.
- Chat, Emails and message service– Integrated with chat enabled features, the website also offers paid users to be in-touch with the profiles they are interested in through chat, emails and even message service.
- Report Abuse – Keeping in mind the safety and privacy of the users, the site offers an application to prevent a particular user from viewing their profile. The users can block or can report the anti-social elements present on the site.
- My Favorites – Under this feature, the users can view the list of the members matching their profiles along with the list of online buddy or favorites. Users can also view/delete the members in favorite, buddy, black or grey list.
- Community – View the list of top voted profiles or all as per profile settings.
- Check Statistics – Paid users can check the number of people who viewed their profile, number of invitations sent and number of friend invited related to their profile.
- Manage own profile – The site also lets the users manage their profile by editing, updating photos and videos, update comments etc.
- Invite friends – The users can also invite their friends to join the site through emails, messages etc. This feature is available to free members as well.
