A design resource for creating more positive social platform experiences
This design resource provides recommendations to improve the design of social platforms for the people who use them. It also includes mockups of new social platform features and a probe kit created to better understand how people use social platform features.
The resource is based on PhD research done with queer young men, but the design recommendations are likely to be broadly applicable to everyone. Learn more about it or see the resources below.
Design recommendations
These recommendations provide prescriptive guidance on designing social platforms in ways that better support peoples' experiences. They are broken up into three broad categories.
1. Give people more agency over their experiences on social platforms
- Give people agency over the content they see
- Give people transparency over the algorithms that present content to them
- Allow flexibility in curating audiences
- Support retroactive curation
2. Help people to navigate mismatched expectations and improve consent over NSFW content
- Support variation in the kinds of connections people are looking to make
- Give people agency over who can message them without forcing matching
- Get consent before showing NSFW content
- Design automated safety features in ways that give people control over how they are applied
- Build consent into audience curation features
3. Help people to connect to community
Design concepts
These concepts came out of co-design workshops with technology designers to explore how to improve the design of social platforms. Our design recommendations are based on participant responses to them in evaluation sessions, and we use their mockups to demonstrate them.
We designed the mockups for each concept as features for either Grindr or Instagram. By basing the mockups on these apps, the features could be shown in less abstract ways and in contexts that participants in the evaluation sessions were already familiar with.
Probes
As part of our research, we created a kit of probes to better understand participants experiences. We share the probe kit we created to inspire and help future social platform research.
