Stopping online harassment and doxxing
As the lead designer, my responsibilities included generating initial concepts, facilitating design workshops and weekly team meetings, providing presentations to leadership, and delivering finalized assets for production.
Team: 1x Product designer (me), 1x Content designer, 1x Researcher, 1x PM, 1x Frontend developer, 1x Backend developer
Responsibilities : Product Design to Engineering Handoff
Timeline: 5 months
Mozilla aimed to diversify its revenue by introducing new product lines aligned with its mission to improve the internet for everyone.
Task: Develop a new product to help victims of online harassment and doxxing
Goal: Find product market fit & get ENG funding
Success metric: X% of test participants would be somewhat or very disappointed if our product wasn’t available
Challenge: Lots of pressure and a short amount of time to do it
Q1 - establish the problem & solution; Q2 - design prototype Q3 - test & iterate
People regularly experience severe online violence, which spills into their IRL lives, and no one is doing anything about it
Among adults, 52% reported being harassed online in their lifetime, the highest number we have seen in four years, up from 40% in 2022.
Online Hate and Harassment: The American Experience 2023, Anti-Defamation League
Lots of tools, nothing comprehensive
• DeleteMe + Mozilla Monitor only removed info from data broker sites
• Lots of tools for domestic violence, but not online violence
• Nothing removed photos or deep fakes
• Most effective tools are expensive, white-glove services
It’s nearly impossible to stop harassment online
Social media sites, search engines, and privately owned site aren’t doing enough
Aligned with our mission to stop online harassment, and leveraging our privacy-focused browser, we decided to build this product as an add-on for Firefox desktop.
Found product-market fit
76% test participants said they would be somewhat or very disappointed if our product wasn’t available to them
Our team was funded!
White House reached out to us!
After developing a viable product and receiving positive feedback from our users, the project was put on hold due to internal issues at Mozilla. We hope to revive this project one day and share it with the world.
We chose to focus on one specific segment: working professionals who face targeted abuse due to their identities or the nature of their work. These individuals encounter a unique set of challenges, and by addressing their needs, we aim to develop solutions that will benefit others as well.
A political candidate faced sextortion in Rwanda
Medical professionals harassed on social media and driven offline
Teachers facing racist and sexist abuse
To help leadership grasp the challenges faced by our target demographic, we created a vision narrative for our leadership team. It was a high-level overview without much focus on solutions, but it effectively conveyed where we aimed to be. We concentrated on the emotions the users were experiencing.
Used an 11-star framework to help inspire innovation and address real customer problems.
We scoped 36 ideas on a matrix to identify the most successful in terms of:
• Customer impact
• Business impact
• Feasibility
We also mapped our solutions to the problem statements to ensure we were addressing the correct issues, to avoid overlooking anything, and to determine our priorities.
With time being a major a constraint, our content designer proposed content-only concept testing
• 1:1 interviews with professionals who have faced severe harassment
Goals:
• Find what resonates with our target persona
• Feature/directional guidance
• Feature prioritization
We experienced a significant failure, but we gained invaluable insights from it!
Overall: People were ambivalent to downright offended. Also, they just didn’t do enough.
New learnings
• People wanted contextual awareness of what was going on
• They spent tons of time googling themselves & capturing evidence
• They want to understand risk levels – how soon do they need to act?
• Constantly reliving the trauma of harassment
Next steps: HMW help take care of this for them?
After several meetings reviewing the data from our users, we pinpointed exactly what we wanted to build.
91 total interviews with research participants + NGOs
Includes initial concept testing
7 prototypes tested over 5 months
1,790 art boards designed in Figma
Onboarding
Delete your home address
Delete your nude images
Delete your hurtful comments and threats