1. eHarmony review: overview

eHarmony is a really effective service for those people who are serious about finding love and prepared to invest some – well focused – time into achieving their aim. It delivers really thorough personality profiling and full profiles, giving you a clear steer as to who you should get talking to.

We took some time out to really put eHarmony through its paces. Signing up with the service and using all the functions and features to give our own view of how effective the site is.

2. eHarmony Practical Test

The eHarmony experience test is based on thorough usage and exploration of eHarmony. To acquire an overall overview of the product we set up a profile on the site and browsed through it as a standard user (man looking for woman). We then went through all the features on the site and initiated first communications.

In addition, we investigated eHarmony’s online reputation, reading through comment boards and forums to understand how customers have experienced the product.

First ideas about eHarmony

eHarmony is a very attractive website and as soon as you land on it, it's clear that the design is better than most. The registration pages are very personalized and full with encouraging pictures and statements. This is good as to register takes time! eHarmony matches you based on a really thorough analysis of your interests and personality traits. It aims to send you matches that are well suited, not just anyone who joins. The system that does all this is based on years of research with Oxford University.

Picture: Encouraging you to get through the Registraion process - eHarmony

The idea is that this should eventually save you time. Taking time to answer lots of questions about yourself in the first place, you will then save time, as the eHaromony algorithm will seek out the right one for you. You don't have to search for your ideal match, with eHarmony they will come to you!

Number of members in your area Test

To get an idea of the amount of members online, we ran a activity test. Dating portals come in a lot of varied configurations, but always the most noteworthy thing for the customer is how many connections he or she gets involved with. How many folk get in touch and how many people react to communications. Our ‘reach’ mark produces a measure against this essential metric for every web site we evaluate. eHarmony did fairly well in this test. There were a whole lot of members online and it looked like a goodish spread of users over the region.

eHarmony profiles

The profile quality on eHarmony really seems to be second to none. There is so much more information about your matches than you find on other services. This is something that really appeared to add value to the quality of our conversation on the site. When you have a lot of information in the profile section there is so much more to talk about.

The matches we contacted seemed to be generally intelligent, responsive and good conversationalists. It is disappointing that you cannot view profile pictures without being a Premium Member, but once you have signed up for the paid service, the quality of matches does make it worth while – or at least did so during our testing.

Are there any fake users on eHarmony?

People pretending to be other people is usually an issue for nearly all dating firms and the test is not whether they have a problem, but how bad it is. Our impression of eHarmony was quite reassuring. eHarmony maintains a good procedure of profile validation and the majority of profiles gave the impression of being authentic. 

3. Functions and profiles on eHarmony

eHarmony is a full and extensive website that offers you a full range of features and functionalities in order to best present yourself and find the perfect match. There are a good number of search possibilities and a lot of information you can fill in your profile.

To begin with eHarmony you need to put aside half an hour to finish their registration test. This should be a time saver in the end. The questions range from stuff about your hobbies to questions on your character 'Are you a talker or a listener Do you like to lead or be led' etc.

When you eventually gain access to the main product you find more optional profile fields to fill in and the opportunity to load lots of photos. Then it's a question of browsing through your matches and kicking off some communications. There is quite a barrier to what you can do without Premium Membership, unfortunately this includes viewing your matches pictures. On the plus side the profiles are well filled out. There is a lot of information you can read for free.

Search

There is an extensive search functionality and you can determine who you want to be matched with based on: Age, income, spirituality, distance, ethnicity.

Picture: Income filters in the search pages - eHarmony 

The book of you

The book of you is your very own, in-depth personality assessment. It has insights about who you are and most interestingly, about how others perceive you.

Picture: The Book of You - eHarmony

What if

What if is a function that allows to you to search outside of the matches eHaromny sends you. Essentially to choose your own form a more random list of members. Nice.

Picture: What if - eHarmony 

Secure Call

This is a nice feature that allows you to make calls through the site - using internet calling - without having to swap numbers.

Picture: Secure Call - eHarmony

4. eHarmony Customer Service

Customer care is a critical issue with online dating sites. The extent to which sites deal effectively with the anxieties and problems their customers have fluctuates massively between sites. How complex is it to make contact with customer services? How fast do they handle customer enquiries. Does the firm use automatic rebilling of subscriptions and how easy is it to cancel this?

Getting hold of Customer Support with eHarmony

There is a very extensive FAQ area on eHaromny . Here you can find the answers to lots of the question you are likely to have. If you need further assistance they offer you different ways of contacting them, depending on the nature of your issue. Sometimes they will ask you to write an e-mail to a specific department, but more often they direct you to a customer care telephone line.

eHarmony layout

eHarmony is a beautifully put together site, possibly the best designed on the internet. Right from the first view of the landing page through to all the profile views and match pages it has a very appealing look and feel. This quality of design says a lot about eHarmony's philosophy overall.

Picture: Stylish looking website - eHarmony 

eHarmony Mobile functionality

eHarmony has a fully developed mobile app and its normal service is compatible with mobile browsers. However, this is all for use once registered. Completing the registration process is definitely something to be done on a reasonably large screen.

5. Is eHarmony value for money?

The majority of dating services offer a free taster of their product, but to use the service properly and interact with other people you nearly always have to pay for Premium Membership. eHarmony is not an exception and to communicate with your matches, you have to pay. We wouldn’t question the need for this. Customers always have to pay up if they want to use a reliable service. Rather, we focus on how eHarmony does on a ‘value for money’ equation. Is it reasonably priced overall?

*these prices were current at the time of writing, but may change

We suggest you choose the six month package. It’s a large up front cost, but once that’s out of the way you’ll be able to really relax and use the service well.