Guardian Soulmates

Smoother experience for Guardian readers finding their soulmates online, and the Guardian Media Group have benefited too!

The Client

Guardian Unlimited is the most successful newspaper website in Britain and is a network of websites for the Guardian and Observer that reaches over 12 million people every month.

The Brief

The Guardian wished to evaluate the visitor experience to their Soulmates dating offer. The objective of the project was to provide insight and actionable recommendations to assist in Guardian’s development of the Soulmates site into a positive experience, with a high propensity to convert visitors.

The Solution

• Expert Review
• Customer experience tests

We conducted an independent audit of the Guardian Soulmates site (dating.guardian.co.uk) and as a result uncovered a series of issues from both a customer experience and a technical development perspective.

To further test out findings from the expert review phase, we then conducted a series of one to one tests with real consumers – both potential and existing customers of Soulmates (and importantly across a range of socio-demographic profiles). The research brought to life a vast range of issues – from quick wins to those with deeper technical implications, challenging assumptions about their audience, and helping to make the overall Soulmates experience a more pleasurable one.

Measuring success

The recommendations allowed the Guardian team to:

• Improve the visibility of the home page by matching search terms more appropriately with the calls to action
• Reflect a more appropriate tone of voice for a dating site
• Improve the registration process
• And thus drive customer registrations up by 62%

Hear from our client

“We not only improved our site from a user perspective but we also saw an instant commercial uplift, which has sustained.  We are still working through some of the deeper changes, which will improve the site even further, but working with Generator allowed us to bring our technical partner into our vision more easily. We learnt a lot along the way.”

Kate Morgan-Locke

Head of GNM Ventures
Guardian, Observer and Guardian Unlimited