Verifying Users While Protecting their Privacy
How do you verify someone when they don’t even want to show their face?
Background and Problem Framing
Grindr is a dating, networking, and hookup app for the gay, bi, and trans community. Many users of the app identify as “discreet.” Within this context, discreet means someone who does not want their identity to be publicly known on Grindr. This can be because they live somewhere where they could lose their job or go to prison for being out. And sometimes, they just don’t want to be associated with the reputation that Grindr has as a hookup app.
Despite the challenges these users face, 1.2M users self-identify with the “discreet” tag on their profiles, making it the most popular tag.
No Pic, No Chat
Even though many users may identify as discreet, discreet users face distrust from other users. This is such a common sentiment that users have developed the acronym NPNC, which means “No pic, no chat.”
The profile of a “discreet” user
Verification Solution Space
Verification is often based on an offline identity, but on Grindr it’s much different. To build trust, users rely on a patchwork of solutions that essentially boil down to users sending photos to each other. On Grindr, users want to verify what eachother look like, not who they are.
However, the problem with this is that users can still be catfished if someone sends a photo that isn’t theirs or a photo that’s old.
Proposed Solution
If users could send send photos that indicate when the photo was taken and reassure the receiver of the photo that the photo was taken by them, then more users would be able to establish trust and develop a connection.
Team
I inherited this project from Josh Welty, another designer on the team. With Leo(PM) and Christina(Researcher), we explored solutions and integrated feedback from Monty(Head of design), AJ (Chief Product Officer), and George (CEO).
My Contribution to the Project
This project started out with a few screens of how the verification might appear in chat. By the end of the project, I had mapped out how it appears in other pages, refined the visual and content design, and integrated this feature with the current photo flow. I worked on this project for 3 months in the spring and summer while also juggling work on content moderation and user privacy.
Badge Placement
When I inherited this project from Josh(Designer), the idea was that we’d have a badge appear next to the image in chat. However, I realized that we probably want this badge to appear on photos that appear in different contexts: on the profile, in albums, and in the media viewer. Given these constraints, we needed a badge that could fit in the photo.
When I started this project, the team envisioned this as a badge however, we were planning to support verifying profiles in the future, so a verified badge and a check-mark badge could be confused with that. I also confirmed through user research that the recency of photos matters for users.
While thinking about how to solve both of these problems, I came up with the idea to solve both of these problems with a date stamp on the photos like you see on photos taken by disposable cameras.
Content Design
Visual Design of the Datestamp
I needed to design a date stamp that people would want to include on their photos, so I collaborated with Christina(researcher) to run user studies. In these, we asked users about what photos they share when verifying themselves. We learned that these photos are mostly “body pics” or “casual” photos. Because these photos are functional and disposable, I chose a visual style that references the Grindr brand and the casualness of disposable camera photos.
Security Features
Throughout this process people asked: “What if someone screenshots someone else’s photo with a timestamp?”
Despite the importance of solving for these scenarios, leadership pushed back against including all of them because they wanted photo verification released sooner. In the end, we agreed to limit the scope of security features in the first version and expand in the future.
Included in the first version
Datestamp on photo.
A “From Camera” label in the chat UI with an expandable information sheet.
Features for future versions
Encrypted metadata tags to prevent metadata editing.
Animation upon opening the image so that these photos can be identified regardless of the context (profile, albums, chat).
In user feedback session, users responded positively, expressing interest in using the feature and seeing others use it. The feature has not been released yet, but I got it approved for development shortly after finishing my designs.
“I think it lowers the risk of potentially having a bad experience… This feature is really good”
"It's a straight real verification process to see who this person is"