From Carsonified: How eHarmony Kills the Romance With A/B Testing

Christine Brodigan (@tenaciouscb), online user-experience product designer, shows her hate of those early-morning “new match notifications”.

Match, Chemistry and a handful of others never shocked me with their emails (some of the usernames that men choose did). However, eHarmony stood out of the crowd for a few reasons:

rapid-fire morning messages, usually between 4 and 8 in a row (like I was under fire from the “matchmaking tool”)

radically different branded email templates

really bad subject lines, all different, but with the same purpose

Beginning January 4, 2010, my inbox filled with an even more challenging set of differing subject lines. More challenging because the messaging was all over the place. Was I a user more interested in “activities,” “spark,” “unique,” “common,” or greatness? I felt like it was eHarmony having the problem ordering off a menu of men and not me. I wanted simple and given to me straight up.

via Carsonified.

Chrissie, I’ll have you know that the subject lines are random and are not tied to any testing or measurement. They have been using at least two dozen of them, by the way, since May 2008.