1. Context
2. Objectives
3. Constraints
4. Stakeholder mgmt
5. UX/Product challenges
6. Outcomes
7. Reflection
Online-remote connection pool
1. Introduction
The title reads like it’s out to flame men, but stay with me. I’m borrowing from Taylor Swift’s Men will let you down. The Eras Tour never will.(1) And you know what happened next. She met her love, now her husband.
Later she wrote about him: I swore my loyalty to me, myself, and I, right before you lit my sky up.(2) So men aren’t that bad after all, right?
When we have been carrying wounds and broken hearts from the past, there are moments when the bitterness takes over and we all want to point at a villain, whether it is a man, a woman or someone in particular. But honestly, I do not think people are the main problem.
No matter how much effort and good intention someone brings to a connection, the outcome is often out of our hands. No one teaches you what to do when a good man hurts you, and you know you hurt him too.(4) This is not to pretend people are without shadows. We do make mistakes that hurt each other. Real humans are imperfect.
Still, I believe the root cause is the experience designed for modern dating. The flows and habits shape how users show up for each other. The dating app system embodies our culture, and its UX makes people get hurt and cause harm. A naive villain, but a villain nonetheless. [note a]
2. Purpose
That said, my goal is not to vilify the apps themselves. I’ve been using them. We know that even without dating apps, human darkness still shows up in different forms and behaviors.
This series is me owning my responsibility as a UX practitioner, and my hope as a user — searching for better solutions, to fix the harms hurting us most:
• Part 1. On swipe culture treating people as objects
• Part 2. On labels, casually cruel in the name of “going with the flow”
• Part 3. On the ghost that haunts you into questioning your worth
• Part 4. On the green/red flag toxicity and the longing to be seen
• Appendix. 3 years of reading, research & real stories.
Disclaimer
1. I respect every ethical choice people make about connections, labels and forms of intimacy. My critique in this series is of the design of the app systems, not of the choices people make within them.
2. With all my understanding and pain around sexual, mental and physical abuse, to every survivor out there: Your pain matters, and I’m sorry I could not cover this in the essay because of my own limits.