Suggestions for UI for Delicate Question w/ Several Options?

Question

I’m a longtime (20+ years) UI/UX designer and full stack developer, but I’m running into a wall with the UI for a specific field, concerning a delicate question that can be approached and handled in several ways in an app that I’m building.

The app in question is a dating app, and the question in question basically needs to ascertain a user’s preference for the HIV status of other users in search results. Users declare their own HIV status in the app in onboarding and in editing their own profile, with the options “positive”, “negative”, and “prefer not to say”, exactly one of which is required.

The problem I am running into stems from the fact that users can choose “prefer not to say”, and a large percentage of users are expected to choose this option—as a result, the related search preferences field cannot simply be a choice between one of “positive”, “negative”, and “any”, because this set of choices excludes important use-cases. The major use cases (in other words, the end-results users need out of their search results) that I can identify are:

1. Exclude only positive users from search results (user is negative and doesn’t want to see any definitely positive users in search results)
2. Exclude only negative users from search results (user is positive and doesn’t want to see any definitely negative users in search results)
3. Include only positive users from search results (user is positive and wants to see only other definitely positive users in search results)
4. Include only negative users from search results (user is negative and wants to see only other definitely negative users in search results)
5. Include all users in search results (user is either positive or negative and has no preference for other users’ HIV statuses in their search results)

As you can see, there are five major use cases stemming from a field that has only three options when users themselves fill it out. All use cases are important, because users need to be able to either include or exclude the “prefer not to say” users in addition to having a preference for either “positive” or “negative”.

Besides the enumeration of options itself, the additional UI/UX pitfalls I see here are twofold:

1. It shouldn’t make things complicated. I could simply have a drop-down menu where users choose one of the five choices/use cases above, but I believe that this would confuse users, because 4/5 options would be so similarly-worded, with repetitive language and important ramifications. It needs to be as simple as possible.
2. I don’t want this field to take over or draw undue attention to the UX in this part of the app. Yes, this is an important consideration, especially for the app and market the app is designed for, but the truth is the topic is a downer, and if it dominates the search preferences (especially if it makes them think too hard about the difference in options), or it could potentially to turn off users. It shouldn’t be two separate questions, for this reason, and it shouldn’t take up more space than other search preferences. For reference, the other search preferences are:

• Location (autocomplete drop-down with optional user device geolocation)
• Age preferences (minimum and maximum ages—single slider w/ two handles)
• What I’m looking for (type of relationship sought—modal with multiple choices as checkboxes)
• Relationship status (acceptable current relationship statuses of other users—modal with multiple choices as checkboxes)

Dating apps are supposed to be fun, and this one is no exception—we want users to focus in having a good time, we want the UX to be aspirational and light-hearted, while still accommodating important considerations.

So for all these reasons, I’m now here looking to see if anyone has a fresh take on this tricky problem and could offer a suggestion that meets the criteria listed above.

On the back end, all of the search preferences listed above, along with the HIV status preference this thread concerns, are used as filters in elastic search to exclude certain sets of users from search results, and then the pool of remaining users is scored according to some other fields (which cover interests, lifestyle, red flags, etc), which sorts that pool of users, and then those results are paginated and delivered to the user upon request.

Thank you for any suggestions you can provide!

Answer 1

Occam's Razor to the rescue: Don't ask it.

First of all, your question is really loaded. It will upset many users and, as you noticed, it introduces complexity and friction without any positive aspect to balance it.

Remember that conditions and diseases don't define a person. Even people who don't have the condition might feel offended, especially with HIV and particularly in a risk group.

From a UX standpoint, you'll probably get a "prefer not to say" answer whether the person is positive or not, making your question pointless while upsetting users and affecting your system.

Also, there could be users with HIV who simply don't know they have it. So, if a user gets sick from another user even though your company said they weren't HIV positive, there might be legal issues for your company.

A final consideration:

Depending on your legal jurisdiction, if you need this information (which might be the case for a medical site but unlikely for a dating site), it's doubtful you can publicly display it. In most places I know, medical records are confidential, so doing this could cause legal problems (unless your laws allow it).

Answer 2

It seems to me like this should address your problem. Or am I missing something?

Answer 3

Only provide 2 options for explicit search

You expect most people to be "not disclosed" - this will severely limit the benefit of any excluding filters, since the majority of your hits will still be "unknown" even if you have a preference when searching.

I would provide a button in the filter-menu called "HIV Status" - if the user clicks on it provide a popup dialog:

Filter by HIV-Status

Some of our users chose to freely self declare their HIV-Status as positive or negative. This declaration is not verified in any way.

• Show only Self-declared positive
• Show only Self-declared negative
• Show all users

Reasoning

The user will usually filter and then search through a list of profiles, where a self-declared HIV status can be displayed. You could even ask on signup "Is HIV-Status something important to you?" and then display the self-declared status more prominently in profiles.

Excluding certain results just sends the wrong message, since most are undeclared, so the filter will most likely have no visible effect for the user and just provide a false sense of security.

Providing an explicit search for self-declared people will give like-minded individuals a way to search for individuals in a similar situation.

Only one Option?

I would even talk to the client if they can change the requirement to only allow declaring HIV-positive explicitly and leave all others unknown. Because realistically you can only be sure to be positive - nobody can ever be 100% sure to be negative.

Negative would immediately lead to more complicated questions: like when was the last test? ... Which is why I would think about removing the option.

Answer 4

Rewording your 5 options:

• No filter for declared HIV status
• Declared HIV-negative (only)
• Declared HIV-negative or Undisclosed
• Declared HIV-positive (only)
• Declared HIV-positive or Undisclosed

Depending on the rest of the interface, offering those as a drop-down might take up the least real estate and draw the least attention to this particular question.

This phrasing subtly emphasizes that what's being searched is a user's declaration of their status, rather than their actual status, since they may be ignorant of or even misrepresenting their true status. Without having medical records, any statement to the effect that the following people are HIV ____ seems risky.

Hypothetically a user could wish to search only for Undisclosed, or for any who are not Undisclosed (i.e. to see both declared positive AND declared negative), but including those options seems like a waste of space & cluttering your form for no likely benefit.

Depending on the assumed fraction of the population that is (or believes themselves to be) HIV positive, the last of those 5 options might also not be worth including. If the assumption is that many user will choose not to disclose, and that the majority of those probably believe themselves to be HIV-negative, then that fifth search option would filter to both some number who know themselves to be HIV-positive, and also many who believe (but didn't disclose) themselves to be HIV-negative. Is that likely to be a desired search result, excluding only those who declared that they're HIV-negative? Obviously, if those assumptions don't match those in the project, then this may be a far more useful option to include.

Answer 5

Without changing your UI or searchability as those are business requirements, only addressing the technical implementation.

I would change your underlying data model persisted to elasticsearch. Instead of a single es doc field, hivStatus with an enumeration of 3 values, change it to 2 fields, declaredHivPositive and declaredHivNegative with true/false values. Then when setting the user’s profile set one or other fields as true if they declare their status or default both to false. That should then support queries for your various use cases.