Met-A-Four_ Love is Blind: A feature to enable accessible dating experience for the visually impaired

Team

Aisha Magsi: Product Manager

Austin Wong: UI Developer

Ramya Bhagirathi Subramanian: UX Researcher

Shawn Lee: UI Developer

Problem and Solution 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?

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

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

Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants

We needed to conduct research to understand who would be using the design that we proposed. We sought to find out if the inaccessibility of dating app usage was truly a problem within the blind community, as well as how the non-blind community would react to this design. The first design research method we explored were academic publications and online videos where blind and non-blind people share their experiences in dating. Given that our user base is niche and the difficulty of finding and interviewing blind people, we resorted to empathizing with users via these means. Our second design research method was conducting a survey distributed among the general population, both blind and non-blind people. Through this, we wanted to explore non-blind sentiment to seeing blind people on dating apps, whether they would be open to dating blind people, and how blind people would feel about having more accessible features on dating apps, and what sort of features they would like to see. The survey also gave us more quantitative data regarding people’s preferences and opinions. Our stakeholders are primarily blind people; however, it was also necessary to inquire from non-blind people who use dating apps as well. Obtaining information from both the perspective of both blind and non-blind people allows us to understand each user group better than if we only studied the blind population which in turn can create better design.

Design Research Results and Themes

From surveying users of dating apps from the public who are not functionally 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. The responses were about evenly split between yes and no. On one hand, many non-blind people saw no issue with dating a blind person. On the other hand, many non-blind people were not open to dating blind people, expressing sentiments like increased difficulty communicating, as well as day to day difficulties associated with dating a blind person. Regardless of whether non-blind people are open to dating a blind person, 93% of the participants of the survey still expressed positive support for dating apps to leverage other senses to provide a more inclusive dating atmosphere, indicating that they would still like to see a greater presence of blind people on dating apps. We found in our literature review that sighted individuals have many negative misconceptions of blind individuals, often assuming that the non-blind partner in a relationship would be a caretaker or do more of the work than the blind partner. They also often assume that blind people are mentally handicapped. Another common misconception is that there’s no physical attraction in a relationship between a blind and non-blind individual. They also incorrectly assume that someone who dates blind people must be a saint. Finally, we found that the physical characteristic of the partner is about as important to blind people as it is to sighted people; blind people who were interviewed in the literature expressed that physical attractiveness, such as body shape and smile, were important factors to them in considering a potential partner. 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.

Figure 4.1: Survey Responses

Figure 4.2: Survey Responses

Figure 4.3: Survey Responses

Figure 4.4: Survey Responses

Proposed Design

We chose the design of adding additional accessibility features to a traditional dating app interface. This was because we thought that this design would be the simplest and provide greatest ease of use as it is something that people are already familiar with which also makes this design better suited to the people we are targeting. Adding other hardware elements such as smart speakers or glasses like we ideated in our other sketches may be more impractical than simply using an app on your smartphone.

The first task that we decided to storyboard was the process of choosing a match. The story illustrates a person playing another user’s audio description of themselves to decide whether they are a good fit for them. We felt this was an important task because it would allow blind users to use the core component of dating apps — deciding whether or not to match with another user on the platform. When we think of dating apps, we think of swiping left or right, so we felt that this task was one of the more compelling tasks to tackle.

Figure 5: Storyboard #1 — Navigating dating profiles and finding a match

The second task we chose to storyboard was a community-based discussion board that provides a space for blind individuals to receive advice from the blind-community. During our use research phase, we heard from multiple different blind individuals that one of their biggest pain points while dating was figuring out when and how to break the ice on their disability with their date. With this feature, blind individuals will now have a supportive community where they can learn from the experiences of other individuals going through similar circumstances.

Figure 6: Storyboard #2 — Receiving guidance from the blind community