How it works
I want to make a group post about a topic I am sensitive about, and I'm worried about what could happen if my identity is revealed.
Anonymous posts allows members to participate in a group without revealing their identity. Every anonymous post is sent to the group admin for approval. Only admins can know the identity of anonymous posters. Certain features are disabled for anonymous posts in order to protect the identity of the member.
MVP flow by previous designer
State of the product
As of January 2022, anonymous posting was enabled in ~3 million groups.
The group composer team believed that anonymous posting would reduce the barrier for participation, thus increasing the number of posts in groups. We also learned that anonymous post creation favored young adults, a key demographic.
Based on these assumptions, we planned to enable anonymous posting for all groups in 2022.
What needed to improve
To move forward, our team needed to solve a few issues that arose from prior research:
1. Admins didn't like the fixed entry point in the composer bar, partly because it couldn't be customized, and because it limited the number of other actions that could be place there.
2. Due to technical limitations, members could not turn anonymous posting on or off without their content being discarded.
3. Admins wanted to announce this feature and tell members how to use appropriately it in their group, or opt out if they didn't want it.
Our team held a workshop and produced a number of designs addressing the issues above. I polished these designs and ran them through rolling research for validation.
We believed the best entry point would be a contextual switch within the composer itself. This had the added benefit of a user being able to toggle it on or off at any time. We tested this against several other concepts. Participants overwhelmingly favored the toggle switch at the top.
"That's perfect, that's what I wanted."
"I usually start at the top of the screen. It was honestly the first thing I saw."
"It's right there when you go to create a post."
We also designed a quick promotion that prompted admins to learn more and announce the feature to the group. The announcement provided a suggested template that admins could edit before posting. Admin participants found this very helpful, and members appreciated the resulting announcement post.
"It [How it works] changed my impression of anonymous posting."
"It gives the do's and don'ts. I like that approach and it's helpful to understand."
"I didn't think I would do this, but since I've been shown how easy it is, I would consider it."
Final solutions
Member creating an anonymous post
Admin education and announcement template
Designed for both mobile and desktop web.
