Not DoingSomething Yet

Being new to London I thought it would be a good idea to try various approaches to meeting new people here. I'm not into online dating but I thought the concept of DoingSomething.co.uk would be a fruitful way of meeting new people. The site places emphasis on the activity rather than the person which makes for a different experience.

Great idea but the execution and implementation of the idea can certainly be improved. After signing up and clicking around on the website it quickly became apparent that, technically, there's still some work to do.

  • It's not possible to change your gender, address and date of birth after signing up. If someone moves to a different address or, indeed, changes gender, then surely that should be possible right? And date of birth could be incorrectly filled in at signup.
  • The "How to Use" page says that you can't send messages unless you're subscribed (i.e., becoming a paid member). Well, I don't have a subscription but I was able to send messages to other people.
  • If you don't fill in any message and click "Send" it will send the placeholder text as message (i.e., "Write your message here").
  • If you double-click on the "Favourite" button, the person is added twice to your list of favourite people.
  • If you double-click on the "Send message" button and then close the message popup dialog the website still has the coloured background overlay.
  • If you "Favourite" a person and then click "Remove favourite", the counter at the top still goes up so it shows you have two favourites, although you actually have none.
  • I can't seem to make the unread count for "Sounds good" go down, even after archiving those messages from those users. Even after refreshing and archiving it remains the same.
  • On the "100 Must Do Dates" page it shows the "Join Now" button even though you're logged in.
  • If you use the "Reset Password" feature then your new password isn't checked for minimum length or other constraints.

What surprises me is that the company has been in business since 2011 and presumably has paying members yet a rather cursory glance reveals these technical issues. I'd say these issues are not hard to find so the end-user experience of others must be affected by it as well. It also doesn't build trust to actually become a paid member of the site.

On the other hand these issues may have been fixed by the time you read this and knowing the technical issues is always the first step towards fixing them.

Contents © 2014 Simeon Visser