Met-A-Four: Improving Tinder UX for the Blind

Love is Blind: A feature to enable an accessible dating experience for the visually impaired. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Czx7ArpArbKbKHO4Yamch-folEAVPBcp9SG8IbYJNkk/edit?usp=sharing

Team

Aisha Magsi: Product Manager

Austin Wong: UI Developer

Ramya Bhagirathi Subramanian: UX Researcher

Shawn Lee: UI Developer

Problem Overview

“It’s a warm autumn evening and you are walking down Champs-Elysees, hand in hand with your partner that you found on a popular dating app. Exchanging smiles, having a nice conversation about something utterly insignificant, laughing and enjoying each other’s company.”

As divine as this sounds, imagine how the situation would be if you were visually impaired? How simple would it be for you to find a person online? How often would you think before revealing your disability to a person you have matched with? How independent would your decisions be? Would you be able to find a match without taking help from a trusted friend or family member? Who motivates you in your endeavors?

Figure 1: Dating for the functionally blind Figure 2: Current Tinder App showing visually focused UI.

Have you considered these factors previously? Have you wondered how the situation would be if you were in their shoes? These are some of the common thoughts that run in the heads of functionally blind individuals while trying to find a date on the existing dating platforms. Our design solution, as an additional feature on existing dating platforms, works towards easing the problem for the visually impaired, by including features on an existing platform that are user friendly for the functionally blind. Currently, there is not a lot of support for the accessibility of popular dating apps for the blind. Apps such as Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble all do not offer support for the blind. In 2017, Tinder’s vice president of global communications branding at the time stated it did not make sense for Tinder to be in the narrative for visually impaired daters. Both the rise in online dating, as well as the lack of accessible support for the blind in this space makes the solution to this problem a necessary innovation for the future.

Figure 3: Global trends and predictions of numbers of people who are blind or moderately and severely vision impaired, from 1990–2050

Solution

In order to solve the problem of judging a potential partner’s attractiveness through an app and without the ability to look at photos of them, we turned to another important sense — hearing. A common finding in our research was that blind people often use the other person’s voice as an important factor when determining their attractiveness. Based on this finding, we designed a solution that allows blind users to listen to their matches’ profiles in their respective voices while minimizing the friction added to non-blind users’ experiences. The feature, called RealVoice, takes a short recording of each user’s natural speaking voice collected during account setup and uses it to create a digital facsimile of their voice. Others can then listen to their profile read aloud to them by this digital facsimile.

We also added a second feature called Community that serves as an exclusive safe space for blind users to seek help and advice from similarly abled users and talk about the pain points specific to the experience of dating while blind. The private community centers around posts that are created based off of a curated list of common questions relating to the blind dating experience. This feature would provide a way for users to tackle issues in a dynamic manner and engage in positive knowledge sharing.

Paper Prototype, Testing Process, and Results

In order to quickly and cheaply improve our idea, we created paper prototypes of our end-to-end user journey and conducted three different user tests to get a first-hand look at how our users interact with our product.

We revised the voice recording flow during onboarding to make the experience more seamless and intuitive. The major concerns users had with the flow was confusion with regards to what the recordings of their voice would be used for and inability to preview the voice recording once they have recorded it. We changed the recording screen to show a sound preview of the default voice by default, and then have the preview update to use the user’s voice once they have done the recording, with the option to toggle and remove the user-personalized filter. This allows the user to know and control exactly what their profile will sound like before and after doing their voice recording.

Before After

We also noticed that the user had difficulty finding the button to play the voice transcription for each profile. To make this feature easier to use, we made the button slightly bigger and of a different color so that the user knows that it plays the audio of the profile that they are viewing. They would also have the option to pause the audio at any point.

Before After

While our original prototype had a free form discussion space for blind users, we decided to revise the design after considering a couple factors; the limited question space for the topic of dating while blind, as well as the existence of communities like r/Blind that served a similar purpose with a similar experience. We decided to go with a more structured forum experience where there are pre-existing questions that are only added to selectively by user request/input, allowing for a higher concentration of users per question and a more focused discussion experience.

Before After

Digital Mockup

The user answers a simple yes/no question about whether they have a disability when they set up their profile. As this is potentially sensitive information, the text button below the options lets them know why this is being asked. Since one of the features is exclusively for blind users, this data helps Tinder to identify the specific users whom they are catered to and also provides assurance that this data will not be used for any other purpose or disclosed to any other users. Next is the screen for enabling or disabling personalized voice transcription on profiles. When the user selects Enable Voice, If the user chooses to enable voice transcription, the next screen prompts them to read a short passage.

Figure 4.1: Voice Enable Feature during the Onboarding process.

As they say the words, the words become highlighted and the waveform grows. Once the entire passage has been said, the completed waveform is shown, and the user is prompted to preview their voice, retake, or accept & continue. Hitting Preview will read a sample profile in their customized voice. The option to retake takes the user back to the beginning of the flow with the passage they need to read. Hitting Continue will take the user to the next screen in the Tinder onboarding flow.

Figure 4.2: Voice Enable Feature during the Onboarding process.

Now the user can get started with viewing and interacting with other profiles. If the current profile that the user’s viewing has allowed for voice transcription, then a yellow play button will appear on the profile. The user can click on the play button to then listen to a transcription of the profile in the profile owner’s voice.

Figure 5: Voice Enabled profiles with Play buttons to listen to the owner’s profile in their own voice.

When the user clicks on the yellow play button, it transforms into a pause button, which the user can click to pause the recording. While the recording plays, the user can see how much time is remaining on the recording as the brown line that surrounds the edge of the yellow button winds down. After swiping left or right on the previous profile, the user lands on the next profile. Once again, the user can click on the yellow play to hear the voice transcription for the current profile in the profile owner’s voice.

Figure 6: Play/Pause button.

Based on our research, most blind users hesitate to reveal that they are visually impaired to the person they meet online, fearing that they might scare them away. Hence to ensure blind users have a safe and free space to discuss experiences and learn from one another about various dating experiences, we have created a “Community Discussions” feature on the app. This feature is exclusive to blind users. The user can click on the community discussion button in the top right corner to access the community discussion page that is exclusive for blind users. Given that many of the users might have similar questions, we decided to opt for a “Commonly asked Questions” method in the Community. The question with the most upvotes/comments and saves would be on the top. Users can respond to the question via comments. They can also listen to the questions and answers provided by other users by tapping on the speaker icon.They can save the question and answers by tapping on the bookmark icon to read later. When the user clicks on the “+” button on the homepage, it directs them to a page where they are able to create a post on the discussion forum. They have the option to add links, images, or polls.

Figure 7.1: Community Discussions.

Clicking on the notifications icon brings you to the notification tab where you can view your activity, and messages. Here we see activity which gives you suggested posts to view, as well as updates on who has upvoted or responded to your comments or posts. The messages tab of the notifications lets the user see who on the community discussion forum has messaged, and allows the user to respond to them.

Figure 7.2: Community Discussions.

Link to Figma: https://www.figma.com/file/zUHIa8ilY2HxhE1M8ffbwZ/Digital-Mock-up

Summary

After conducting user research through surveying, reading academic literature, and watching videos of first-hand accounts of functionally blind people, we identified several key points integral to approaching a design. From surveying users of dating apps from the public who are not blind, we gauged some information about whether they would be open to dating someone who is functionally blind if they were to meet on the app. We discovered that the sentiment regarding dating a blind person as a non-blind person was mixed. Some saw no issue with dating a blind person, but on the other hand, some were not open to dating a blind person expressing problems such as increased difficulty communicating. Regardless of whether non-blind people are open to dating a blind person, 93% of the survey participants still expressed positive support for dating apps to leverage other senses to provide a more inclusive dating atmosphere. Through our literature review and video research, we found that physical characteristics of a partner are as important blind people as it is to sighted people. Blind people who were interviewed in the literature expressed that things such as body shape and smile were important factors to them in considering a potential partner, as well as putting a heavy emphasis on the sound of a person’s voice as an important characteristic. In addition, they also care about their own appearance, putting effort and thought into what clothes they wear to the date and how they will be perceived by their date. From the research findings, we developed a design that would address the issues we discovered. The first feature of our solution includes voice dictation of user profiles on Tinder to enable blind users to gain an accurate description of user profiles as well as the physical characteristics of them. However, as we discovered the sound of someone’s voice is an important trait for blind people when considering a potential partner, our solution features a tool to capture your voice and subsequently dictate your profile in your own voice to blind users of Tinder. The second feature enables blind users to gain access to an exclusive community forum where they are able to come together with other blind users and ask dating questions in a Reddit-like format. This is important because we found that many blind experience struggles in dating such as not knowing when to disclose their disability to someone they’re talking to. We hope this community will provide a safe space for blind people to come together, and ask questions about dating that they would otherwise not be able to ask. With these two features together, we hope that our solution will allow blind people to take full advantage of the resource known as online dating that is only getting more and more popular with time. Dating as a blind person comes with struggles unique to the community, and we hope that our solution can help alleviate some of the pain points that come with it.