GRINDR
New way to discover others with My Tags
Striking up a conversation can be awkward and unoriginal, as many profiles have primarily stat-based information, such as height, weight, and age. Through improvements to My Tags, we created a way for people to easily express their interests, activities, and unique traits, while also opening up the door for enhanced initial conversation topics.
Role
Product Designer
PLATFORMS
iOS, Android, Web
Responsibilities
All aspects of the design including product strategy, user research, wire-framing, journey mapping, prototyping, design specs, and visual design.
An Unsatisfying Existing Solution
Through user interviews, we discovered that the original My Tags experience was frustrating. Most people found the existing tag system to be confusing, as tags were neither clickable nor searchable. These insights underscored the necessity for a significant overhaul of the "My Tags" feature, with a primary focus on improving usability, increasing interactivity, and expanding available options to offer users a more fulfilling and expressive experience.
Frustration with Static Tags: User interviews revealed a common frustration: the original "My Tags" experience proved vexing. The tags' static nature, lacking both clickability and searchability, restricted users in effectively expressing themselves.
Craving More Tag Options: Research also highlighted users' strong desire for a broader array of tag choices. They sought additional tags to better convey their unique interests and personalities, emphasizing the need to expand available options for a more expressive experience.
Improving the User Experience
In the ideation phase of this product redesign, the central objective was to fundamentally enhance the user experience by facilitating a more efficient means for users to search, discover, and engage with potential matches.
The primary goals were to simplify tag selection for users, ensuring an effortless process, and to create an attractive, user-friendly format for tag presentation on profiles. Additionally, there was a focus on using these tags to enhance search functionality, providing users with a robust search tool to find matches aligned with their preferences and interests.
incorporating relevant feedback
We conducted user tests to ensure these improvements genuinely met user needs. This approach provided valuable insights into whether these changes effectively facilitated their core objectives on Grindr.
Throughout this iterative process, one clear takeaway emerged: selecting tags needed to be more straightforward. In response, we added two enhancements – categories and a search feature. These additions aimed to enhance users' ability to easily locate and select tags that resonated with them, streamlining the tag selection process into a simple and efficient task.
Adding Tags to Profile
For the MVP design, it was important that users could easily find and add tags with which they resonated. Therefore, we classified the hundreds of available tags into higher-level categories such as “Interests”, with future plans to release additional ones.
Selected Tags are highlighted at the top of the dialogue for easy access.
Finding others with mutual interests
To further enhance this experience, a search bar was added for users to easily find possible matches. Individuals with the same tags are visually indicated on the profile. This helped us maximize the utility of the tags and ensure users could search or discover others who shared similar interests. By making tags clickable, we aimed to foster more meaningful and quick connections within the Grindr community.
Working with Devs to implement design
Throughout the design process, I worked with our development team to come up with solutions that were technically feasible and met the product requirements.
These conversations helped ensure the final design spec was understood and agreed upon.
Re-Introducing Users to My Tags
For the new roll-out, we clearly communicated the new benefits of this feature to users.
We designed an onboarding experience that easily engages the user in tagging. In addition, we launched a marketing campaign to spread awareness of this feature across social platforms.
