While participants appreciated the design of Local Guide, they critiqued the variety of information that it offered. The concept was designed to help people while travelling, so we wanted it to show information for a city that was not where the evaluation sessions were taking place. The co-design workshops where the concept was envisioned were held in San Francisco, and to pay homage to this fact, we decided to set the mockup to display information for the city.
To do so, we looked online for real events, venues and support services in the city that were advertised as being for the LGBTQ+ community to incorporate into the mockups. However, as some participants in the evaluation sessions rightly pointed out, the featured events and venues focused primarily on the dominant scene for queer men in San Francisco, and did not represent a wide cross-section of the community. Similarly, our participants in earlier studies often lamented that the content they see on social platforms only represents a narrow slice of what it means to be a queer man. Such experiences highlight that social platforms should designed in ways that are mindful of supporting a wide range of interests and do not unnecessarily contribute to reinforcing dominant norms that can perpetuate harm.