Designing Opportunistic Social Matching Systems for Women's Safety During Face-to-Face Social Encounters
Caroline Bull, Hanan Khalid Aljasim, Douglas Zytko · 2021
This paper presents emerging findings from a participatory design study with women about how future designs of opportunistic social matching systems can foreground user safety. The study is motivated by a relative lack of focus on user safety in social matching systems (Tinder, Bumble, etc.) in light of advances to user discovery mechanisms that enable increasingly rapid face-to-face encounters. Findings highlight ways that social matching systems could support users’ safety after they have left home to pursue a social opportunity in the physical world. Co-designers envisioned a social matching system acting as a “guardian” that genuinely cares for, and monitors, the user's safety even if it cannot flawlessly mitigate harm. Rather than respond only after a definitive harm has occurred, co-designers expected the system to intervene earlier, during ambiguously unsafe or uncomfortable situations. The paper considers directions for future work in response to users’ expectations for how social matching systems should coordinate with trusted contacts to intervene in unsafe situations.