Kik — Privacy Controls

Kik is a messenger. One of the ways people find each other on it is public groups: rooms anyone can join. The catch is that joining one gives every other member a direct line to your DMs. For some people that is the point. For others it is the creep at the party following you to the kitchen. My job was to let people shut that door without leaving the room.

Users loved the groups. They did not like the side effect: a stranger now had a direct line to them. The reviews said it plainly: It keeps the creeps away - Female, 18. This was not an annoyance. It was a reason people felt unsafe, and unsafe people leave.

Safety settings have a trap: the people who need them most never go hunting for them. So two questions. Turn DMs off everywhere at once, or group by group? And does the control live in global Privacy, or in the group where the discomfort actually happens?

The global switch looked simpler. So we shipped that first.

The feature was wanted. 83% liked having the control. But the all-or-nothing switch was the wrong shape. 89% wanted to turn DMs on or off per group, not everywhere at once, the highest number in the study.

It makes sense. You might want to chat openly in your hiking group and stay sealed off in a 300-person channel. V1 gave people a light switch for the whole house when they wanted one for each room.

V2 moved the control into the group. A "Receive Direct Messages" toggle right in the group info screen, next to notifications — no menu-diving. Open where you want to be open. Closed where you do not.

Safety is not one wall you build once. It is a set of small, situational choices, and the best thing you can do is hand people the controls and trust them to know their own rooms. They told us it kept the creeps away and made Kik feel better to be on. Which was the whole job.