Building expanded gender options on signup
By: Pinterest Engineering
Tags: Inclusion, Pinterest, Diversity, UX, Gender

Tilde Pier | Pinterest engineer, Partner

Last June, Pinterest launched custom gender options to make the product even more inclusive. More recently, we expanded this feature to allow new Pinners to enter a custom gender when they sign up. As we build the world’s catalog of ideas, we want to make sure all ideas and people are included in our mission. I recently gave a talk at AlterConf on the story of custom gender options at Pinterest. Here’s how we built the feature and what’s new since we launched.

Gender is a sensitive topic. Many folks might not understand why it’s important to provide options beyond “male” and “female.” How could we show this feature to the small minority of users to whom it’s very important, without potentially upsetting or confusing other folks?

Web design iterations

The first iteration we tried was a radio button that added the option to select a custom gender. However, the “custom” button label didn’t fit under the text box in German and French. When internationalizing a user interface, it’s recommended to leave 30 percent more horizontal space to accommodate languages with a longer average word length. The look and feel of Pinterest is extremely important, so it was time for a new approach.

Next, we tried using symbols to reduce the amount of horizontal space used. This approach also had problems. First, there isn’t one single symbol that represents all people who don’t identify as male or female. In addition, many people are unclear which symbol means “male” and which means “female,” so this form was likely to cause confusion for everyone. Furthermore, these symbols don’t work cross-culturally. Not so fun fact: anything that can be considered “LGBT propaganda” is illegal in Russia, and a symbol for non-binary folks could fall into that category. Thus, this version of the form wasn’t gonna fly.

Finally, we went with an info icon.

When a user hovers over the icon, a tooltip pops up where we explain why we’re asking for gender. When the user enters a custom gender in the text box and hits “Save,” the Male and Female text is replaced with the text they typed.

Data-driven approach

The signup form is an important piece of real estate, since it impacts many top-line business metrics. We took a data-driven approach here by testing these changes in an A/B experiment.

Our experiment was trying to prove the null hypothesis: we needed to verify that adding custom gender options wouldn’t decrease signups. Statistically speaking, it’s more difficult to prove an experiment doesn’t have an effect, than to prove that it does. You need bigger groups, more data.

Initial experiment results showed about a 1 percent drop in signups. I hypothesized that users were unintentionally triggering the hover interaction, getting confused, and abandoning the flow. We decided to change the hover interaction to a click interaction and run the experiment again. This time around, signups were flat — hooray! We combed through our logs to verify that users were interacting with the feature so we could be confident users who wanted to find and use this feature could easily do so.

A bolder mobile design

In our mobile signup flows, we took a bolder approach and put custom gender straight into the signup flow — it’s not hidden at all. Since the whole flow was redesigned, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. However, the new flow converts at a higher rate than the older one. Quantitative data never tells the whole story, though. During user research, feedback about custom gender on signup was uniformly positive. For example, one user said “Custom gender is an awesome idea in our progressive social climate.”

Recommendations for gender-inclusive design

If you’re building a product and wondering how to represent gender, ask yourself if you really need that info in the first place.

If you truly need gender info from your users, use a free-form text box. Users who fall outside the gender binary identify in many different ways. If you try to keep a list, you’ll inevitably leave some of us out: it’s easier to let people enter whatever they want!

The bottom line

Adding expanded gender options didn’t adversely impact our metrics. Sometimes it’s important to spend time on features for a minority of your users, because it’s just the right thing to do.

Acknowledgements: Big thanks to Michael Probber, Angel Stegler, Rick James Chatas, Vivian Qu, Mustafa Motiwala, Ludo Antonov, Evany Thomas and Seth Lauer for their contributions to this feature!