Redesigning with Care: Dating Apps
What would dating apps look like if they were designed with a little more care? How do you even go about the business of caring and why is it important?
Well, I’d like to address the latter question first, it's important to care because care is a long term strategy. Care is also a form of resistance, according to Otobong Nikaga, this viewpoint exists from the perspective of climate and sustainability, which sits well with the idea that designing with care also means designing consciously and with longevity in mind. So, let's remind ourselves of the principles for designing with care:
Picture taken at the Hayward Galley Earth Exhibition
The Designing with Care Principles:
Design for Flexibility and Adaptability through ongoing communication.
Individualised Analysis and person-centric Prediction.
Designing whilst taking into account the biases that are underpinning design decisions.
Design for Active Contribution, Responsibility, and Empowerment.
Design for increasing transparency around the human knowledge involved in building the product or service.
We had taken these principles to MozFest in March 2023 and gotten folks to apply them to current services and apps and one of these was generically titled “Dating apps”. Why did we choose dating apps? Well because not only have they become ubiquitous within the population with Pew Research Center reporting that “about half of those under 30 (53%) report having ever used a dating site or app” and that when looking at sexual orientation, lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) adults are more likely than their straight counterparts to say they have ever used a dating site or app (51% vs. 28%).
Everyone deserves love and a relationship that they are happy with but it seems that whilst various dating apps seem to promise these results, folks on these apps are now experiencing burnout with endless swiping resulting in bad mental health. In 2016, Match included a question about fatigue on its annual survey of 5,000 single Americans, and about half of respondents said they were burned out with their dating life.
So, how can applying these principles result in care? Here are some ideas that our workshop participants came up with:
1. Design for Flexibility and Adaptability through ongoing communication.
When a user has gone on a date, it may be useful to design a “check-in”, which is personal to them but allows them to process their feelings/thoughts about the date, so they aren’t left ruminating, especially if it's a bad experience.
2. Individualised Analysis and person-centric Prediction(s).
Those folks that talked about burnout and cited the mental health issues they faced with dating apps also noted that there was a dehumanising aspect of online dating that has made them feel like no more than another number or like. Allowing folks to chart their own dating journey and being able to see dating apps as a reflective tool rather than just a way to gain validation from others was a suggestion from our participants. This also meant that the algorithm that's involved in showing potential matches to users, should also have a level of transparency, with it being clear on how matches are curated for the user, so that any predictive matches feel a lot more personalised.
3. Designing whilst taking into account the biases that are underpinning design decisions.
It's important to account for who is involved in the design process and for the team involved to have practices in place that allow them to reflect on how their own experiences may lead to biases in the design decisions that they make.
This means that researchers are then able to ask better, more meaningful questions and the designs are able to reflect the lived experience of their users better.
4. Design for Active Contribution, Responsibility, and Empowerment.
Allowing users to communicate effectively to the people that work within the dating app organization and having a clear understanding of how any complaints are being handled.
We know that currently, with most major dating apps, there is rarely a follow up for a complaint that has been made and this can leave users feeling a sense of shame and unease, that perhaps what they have said was not taken seriously.
5. Design for increasing transparency around the human knowledge involved in building the product or service.
The dating app algorithm is a mystery and most people have no idea how any data about them is stored, used or even becomes an essential part of the service they are using.
Data transparency and clarity around how both quantitative and qualitative data has been collected and used to further develop the service is an act of care and serves to build trust between users and service alike.
A long term strategy that is not just reliant upon KPI’s that revolve solely about quantitative measurements of how people are interacting with a service but also the qualitative, the emotive elements. The better your care strategy the more likely you are to keep people engaged because users know that:
Your product is transparent when it comes to how their data is benign stored, managed and used.
Design decisions are not purely made with revenue in mind but the actual needs of the users
The design is flexible and adaptable based on iterative feedback that take into account changing dynamics. E.g. How does one date in the pandemic?
Are you ready to design with care?
