How can we hold ourselves accountable for users’ safety?

Project timeline

Each round of building & testing combine problems addressed in other case studies for this project. Later, you may see features in the screens that are not talked about here.

Investigation

The safety of our users is our priority, we want to be able to check in with users to make sure they are not endangered by being on our platform.

From interviews, I’ve learned a tactic people employ when they go on a date that someone who seems sketchy. They will tell their friends about the date, and their friends will check in on them afterwards. But since some forms of kink is still a highly stigmatized practice, people will be more reluctant to reach out to their friends.

An Idea: Scheduled a Check-in

Users can opt in to let us know when their date is, and we will check in with you 12 hours after your scheduled date. Even if nothing went wrong, it’s still fun to gush about a good date!

Our chatbot helps our users work through their feelings. If the they would like to speak with one of our counselors, it will spend a notification for them to get in touch.

Constructing empathetic software

For this check-in feature, we put together a team of trauma trained therapist, who together with our Content Director crafted the language of how we would communicate with our users when we check in with them.

I was responsible for making sure the conversation fit together logically. From the script they spent me, I constructed the flow chart that would guide how I am to program out chatbot. I put myself in the mind of a user who might have just got out of a traumatizing date to predict how they would respond to our messages.

And I learned...

Empathizing with a traumatized user, through the several iterations of constructing a conversation flow proved to be an emotionally and physically draining experience. I have a new found respect for our community accountability team, who has to do this on regular basis as social workers

Testing

All of the feedback we got from testing out this feature was with the wording, which we updated afterwards.

However our post-test surveys provided us new information. We got an idea of how we can make users feel more secure about their potential dates even before meeting.

New people are more trustworthy, if someone vouches for them

From the surveys, I’ve also come to learn that people are more likely to trust new people if they are vouched for by their friends.

This is the selling point of Hinge, to leverage off mutual connections. Maybe we should allowed users to vouch for their partners and well as people they’ve matched with.

Solution: Vouching System

A user may vouch for either their partner or a connection. We ask the following questions:

• Were they honest with the information (photos and bio) they provided in their profile?
• Did they respect your boundaries?
• Are they a good communicator?

until future improvements

Checkout other KinkedIn case studies:

• Define values with logo design
• Finding likely matches for people
• Encouraging people to respect eachother