Behind the Scenes: The Week Circles Started Joining Up

This week, I started to see the actual journey I want members to take when they discover swingcircles, and also decide on the design of the very hub of the community.

See Circles → understand it → register quickly → verify → Choose Membership

I am trying to keep the process as quick as possible. What I don’t want, is for people to be tied up with seventeen screens asking about the colour of their pet monkey when all they want to do is get inside and have a poke about (literally). Although we’re a way off launch, the ‘wireframe’ I’m putting together is all based around that.

Once that’s in place, the Founding Members can build a profile → discover people → join community spaces → attend things → connect safely.

Simplified registration. I settled on one lightweight Founding Member subscription, rather than creating separate founding-man/founding-woman/founding-couple memberships. Detailed information belongs in the profile afterwards. Registration’s job is basically: prove you’re human, prove you’re an adult, get inside. I also brought GDPR consent, CAPTCHA and Veriff into that thinking, while deliberately trying not to turn signup into an HMRC tax return.

Rebuilt the live cam experience. I re-worked live cam ‘lobby’ design through several iterations. The rooms themselves have an intentional design too. I landed on the three right-aligned docked cams, full-height chat on the left, users underneath the cams, mute controls, explicit-content controls, requests-to-view, private/public broadcasting, reporting and blocking, the events calendar scrolling under the action. Looking at it next to the competitors and, frankly, the competitor live chat room suddenly looked like it had been assembled during a fire drill. It looks beautiful and will be lightning fast. There’s going to be a dedicated server for the Live Cam rooms and it will have its own sub-domain.

Designed the member profile properly before choosing the machinery underneath it. This was quite a significant decision. Instead of accepting whatever a membership/profile plugin decides a profile ought to look like, I created the Circles version first and will make the technology conform to it. With a “Soft Lounge” profile design, Open to Connect/Open Tonight ideas, verification information and the Trust Snapshot (my version of verification after a meet).

Clarified the membership stack. Paid Memberships Pro and Profile Builder Pro are now part of the stack, with Founding Membership free until launch and the eventual paid member types sitting behind that.

Built out Quiz Night as an actual community feature. Not just “maybe we’ll have quizzes.” I created a whole bank of competitive quiz concepts and started populating them, including Carry On quotes, dating slang, 70s disco, Monty Python, saucy British slang, scandals, historical lovers, cocktails, naughty British place names and more. We also developed the social promotion style and created teaser concepts, and finished the public Quiz Night presentation.

Started exposing more of the community publicly. The thinking shifted from merely selling membership to showing people what Circles actually feels like. Quiz Night can be visible. The chat lobby can potentially be visible. Circles Guides are visible. That led naturally into the idea of a richer Features page rather than a sterile list of functionality.

Finished the Circles Guides public page. I developed the main Guides presentation plus separate routes into Circles for Men, Circles for Women and Circles for Couples. That page is now essentially done. After launch and once we’re all bedded in (pun intended) I want to invite guest writers, monthly member ‘roulette’ (randomly pick a member and interview them, possibly live), and even podcast. Ideas coming out of my ears much?

Got the Events area into shape. I battled with The Events Calendar styling, mystery logos, caching and giant headings until the events pages actually looked like Circles rather than somebody else’s WordPress plugin wearing a fake moustache. I reached the point where I call the events calendar ready.

Worked on the club/event data underneath it. In the ‘Swingers Directory’, I completed some boring-but-essential plumbing happening behind the shiny saloon doors. Since I get approached a lot on the competitors site by ‘photographers’ and ‘masseurs’ I thought, well, hey, put your money where your mouth is and make functionality where members can put up a ‘trade listing’ of sorts. Who knows where that will lead. When you know that your members are verified adults, there’s a lot more I want to offer them. Because, why not?

Continued building the Trust Centre. The Trust Centre page and its supporting policies are substantially established, including age verification, GDPR/data protection, accessibility, content moderation, complaints and appeals, IP/copyright and responsible disclosure. This week it became increasingly connected to the actual member journey rather than existing as a pile of policies nobody reads.

Moved age verification closer to the product itself. Veriff isn’t just a policy checkbox now. I’m starting to design registration and membership flows around the principle that Circles IS Private. Verified. Chaos-Free.

Thought through member-to-member verification. I started exploring how members could verify factual things about somebody they’ve met and how a webhook could write those results back to the member’s profile. Sensibly, I excluded the more subjective “would meet again?” territory before accidentally inventing TripAdvisor for sexual chemistry. We’re British. Even if the meet bombed, he turned up dressed like a hobo and was 5ft5 instead of 5ft11, we’re still going to say something nice so what’s the point? ‘Turned Up on Time’ ‘Well Presented’ ‘Respected Boundaries’ are really the facts we want to see.

Did more work on the public visual identity. The #BA93A7 palette, dark backgrounds, retro western/cartoon styling and more modern, sexier characters are becoming much more consistent across headers, profiles, Guides, Quiz Night, events and chat. Circles is starting to have a recognisable visual language rather than merely a colour scheme. I chose it over my original design because the old one felt like a ‘corporate stock image’

Kept the commercial side moving too. The business plan work continued, including the advertising evidence that the campaign had already produced 20 subscribers, and the Circles business proposition is becoming easier to explain because there is now considerably more product to point at.

And there’s a lovely theme running through all of it. This wasn’t really “the week I built a chat room” or “the week I fixed Events.”

It was the week I started designing the journey.

Right I’m off, before I start wondering whether Bright Western could be tweaked and I end up down a rabbit hole of RGB’s.