Our Mission
MeetonAero.com
Dating designed for meaningful connections
MeetOnAero is a gay social community designed for meaningful connection. Whether you’re looking for friendship, dating, conversation, or a stronger sense of community. With member-controlled privacy, social discovery, and optional recovery-friendly features, MeetOnAero gives people more ways to connect without defining them by hookups, sobriety, or relationship status.
1.
Research & Discovery
I explored competing gay dating platforms and online LGBTQ+ communities to understand how they support connection, discovery, privacy, and user interaction. I also looked at how these digital spaces can influence the broader community, including their impact on social connection, dating culture, inclusion, and recovery.
research Approach
First, I researched existing gay dating and social platforms to understand how they approach connection, discovery, privacy, and user intent. I also explored research on substance use, recovery, and social connection within the LGBTQ+ community to identify opportunities for a more intentional, supportive, and community-focused experience.
Competing Gay Social Platforms
I reviewed several leading gay dating and social platforms, including Grindr, SCRUFF, Jack’d, Hinge, Sniffies, and Queerity. Grindr and Sniffies focus heavily on location-based discovery and immediate connection, while SCRUFF and Jack’d combine dating with broader social and community features. Hinge places more emphasis on compatibility and relationship-focused dating, while Queerity is centered specifically around sober and sober-curious LGBTQ+ connection.
Together, these platforms helped me identify opportunities for MeetOnAero to focus on meaningful connection, community, privacy, and optional recovery-friendly features within a broader gay social experience.
Creative solution
This created an opportunity to explore a different type of gay social platform, one that supported dating, friendship and community while giving members greater control over their exposure to recovery-related triggers and substance-centered interactions.
2.
The User
MeetOnAero is designed primarily for gay men ages 18–65+, including men in recovery and anyone looking for a more intentional way to connect. Some members may be looking for friendship, dating, conversation, or community, while others may choose to meet or hook up… and that’s okay too.
The goal isn’t to judge how people connect, but to create a space where members have more control over the experience they want, including the option to step away from hookup- or substance-focused environments.
Gay men ages 18-65+
Seeking dating, friendship, conversation, or community.
Recovery-friendly, not recovery-exclusive
Members in recovery can feel supported without being defined by sobriety.
Choice without judgment
Users can pursue hookups, relationships, friendships, or simply a social space that feels less hookup-focused.
3.
Visual Direction
MeetOnAero visual direction board showing the brand logo, color palette, typography, photography style, app icons, UI components, buttons, gradients, glass effects, and interface patterns.
Marketing Collateral
4.
Product Experience
MeetOnAero combines discovery, communication, community, and recovery-support tools into a single responsive experience. Clear navigation, visual member cards, location-based discovery, and quick-access features were designed to reduce friction and help users move naturally from browsing to meaningful connection.
Connect
Messaging
The inbox provides private communication between members after they discover someone they want to talk with.
Connect Live
A quick-access communication feature gives users another path toward interacting with other members directly from the discovery interface.
Discover
Member Discovery
Users can browse member profiles through a visual directory. Each card provides quick information such as the member’s photo, location, recent activity, and what they’re looking for, helping people decide who they want to connect with without opening every profile.
Interactive Member Map
The local map lets users discover members geographically and see who may be nearby. It gives the platform a location-based discovery option alongside the traditional member directory.
Search Members
A dedicated member search gives users another way to find people beyond browsing the map or directory. This can support more intentional discovery based on who or what they are looking for.
Online Now
Recent Members
Recovery Milestone Counter
5.
Applying the Visual Direction
Rather than following the darker aesthetic common across many dating apps, I designed MeetOnAero to feel bright, social, and welcoming. Inspired by familiar social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, the interface uses clean typography, vibrant gradients, approachable layouts, and recognizable interaction patterns to make connecting feel intuitive. Each design decision supports the larger goal of making meeting people feel less transactional and more like joining a community.
Homepage
I wanted MeetOnAero to have a brighter, more welcoming social-network aesthetic, so I intentionally moved away from the darker visual language common in many dating apps.
A clean white and neutral color scheme creates a lighter, more open environment, while purple and blue gradients add energy and personality throughout the experience. Familiar social patterns and clean typography help the platform feel intuitive, with the goal of making connection feel less transactional and more community-driven.
Compatibility Matching
Our matching system focused on the factors two members had in common, giving each connection more potential to develop beyond initial attraction. Matches considered shared hobbies, interests, weekend activities, and lifestyle preferences, along with factors such as pets, travel frequency, smoking, and drinking.
Building Community Beyond Dating
I designed the activity feed to make community a central part of MeetOnAero rather than something hidden away behind forums or spaces centered primarily around sexual encounters. By using a familiar, Facebook-style feed, members can comfortably share whatever matters to them—from everyday updates and personal interests to recovery milestones, accomplishments, or even a connection they made through the platform.
The larger goal was to give members a reason to remain part of the community even after finding someone. Because MeetOnAero is designed to be less sexually charged than many traditional dating platforms, the experience needed to remain useful and comfortable for people who were no longer actively searching for a match. Instead of treating a successful connection as the end of the user journey, the community feed allows it to become part of an ongoing social experience.
Responsive & Mobile Experience
MeetOnAero was designed as a responsive web experience, adapting its layouts, navigation, profiles, activity feed, and member discovery tools across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. Because members may interact with the platform throughout the day, maintaining a consistent and intuitive cross-device experience was an important part of the product.
The goal was not simply to shrink the desktop experience, but to preserve the core MeetOnAero experience while making each screen feel intentionally designed for the device being used.
6
Reflection & Future Direction
This section reflects on the final MeetOnAero experience, including its visual design, usability, information architecture, and overall user experience. It also looks at what I learned while designing and building the product, the challenges that shaped the final result, and how those lessons will influence future improvements as the platform continues to grow.
Outcome
I’m proud of where MeetOnAero has evolved as both a product and a design system. My goal was to create a social platform that felt welcoming, intuitive, and visually distinct while giving members more ways to connect beyond the traditional dating-app experience.
From the beginning, visual hierarchy was a major priority. I designed the experience from the ground up, including the iconography, gradient system, interface components, navigation patterns, member profiles, activity feed, map experience, messaging features, privacy controls, and responsive layouts. I wanted every element to feel like part of the same product rather than a collection of disconnected plugins or features.
Just as importantly, MeetOnAero became more than a visual design exercise. Building a functioning platform required me to work through technical limitations, WordPress and BuddyPress integrations, plugin conflicts, custom PHP, CSS and JavaScript, responsive behavior, performance concerns, and privacy considerations. Those challenges pushed me to think beyond individual screens and consider how design decisions affect an entire working product.
Reflection
One of the biggest lessons from this project was that designing a social network is not only about creating an attractive interface. The experience ultimately depends on whether people feel comfortable participating, discovering others, communicating, and returning.
The dating and social networking space is extremely competitive, and I understand that the long-term success of a platform like MeetOnAero depends heavily on building an active membership base. A strong interface can support a community, but design alone cannot create one. Adoption, trust, moderation, retention, and network effects will ultimately determine whether the product succeeds.
That perspective changed the way I approached the project. Instead of thinking only about what features I could add, I began thinking more carefully about why a feature should exist, what problem it solves, and how it affects the member experience as a whole.
I also learned the value of iteration. Some of the strongest parts of MeetOnAero emerged after revisiting earlier decisions, simplifying interactions, improving responsive behavior, and solving problems that only became visible once the product was being used as a functioning website rather than viewed as a static design.
Skills I Acquired
Building MeetOnAero taught me how much product design overlaps with technical implementation, content structure, privacy, safety, and ongoing maintenance. Throughout the project, I gained hands-on experience with redirects, server error logs, WordPress configuration, troubleshooting, plugin testing, custom PHP, category and content organization, maintenance pages, and debugging conflicts between different systems.
I also worked through more operational aspects of launching a real platform, including creating privacy policies and terms of service, connecting CAPTCHA protection to sign-in and registration, designing safety-focused pages and graphics, and thinking more carefully about how users move through information across the site. These challenges helped me become more comfortable working outside the boundaries of traditional interface design and gave me a much better understanding of what it takes to maintain and improve a functioning digital product over time.
Next Steps
My next goal is to move MeetOnAero from product development toward community building and real-world validation. Rather than continuing to add features indefinitely, I want to learn how people actually use the platform and allow that behavior to guide future design decisions.
Future work will focus on gathering user feedback, observing where members encounter friction, improving onboarding and profile completion, refining member discovery and compatibility features, strengthening privacy and safety tools, and continuing to improve accessibility and responsive behavior.
MeetOnAero taught me how much goes into taking a product from an idea to a functioning experience. I came away from the project more confident not only in visual and interaction design, but also in product thinking, systems design, technical problem-solving, iteration, and designing within real-world constraints.
Ultimately, I’m satisfied with what I created, but I don’t consider MeetOnAero finished. I see it as a living product, one that can continue evolving as the community grows and as I learn more from the people using it.
