Emmanuel was confident and charming. In a sunlit East Coast library, he leaned back in his chair and told me about how he had just met a girl at a club. He told me about how they instantly connected and exchanged numbers. Soon enough, texts became sexually explicit, and they started sharing fantasies.
It was clear he was comfortable sexting. But when it came to sexual health and well-being — asking about STI status, protection preferences, or boundaries — he admitted feeling embarrassed and afraid.
Emmanuel is not alone.
When it comes to sexual health and wellness, my team and I found young men often know what to talk about, but lack the language for how to talk about it. They know, for example, that it’s important to be specific about desires and boundaries and to inquire about their partners. But how?
I heard Emmanuel’s story and dozens like it after two colleagues and I were accepted into a tech start-up accelerator that fostered innovation in sexual health programs. Each of us had grown frustrated with health interventions built on the desires of policymakers, not young people.
We entered the program asking ourselves: How might we harness the media preferences of young men to encourage pleasurable and safe sexual experiences?
Eventually, our answer became Wingman, a smartphone keyboard that helps young men talk about the hard stuff.
Pictured is me, left, co-conducting an intercept interview with Wingman co-founder and two prospective Wingman users, in Chicago, IL, May 2019. We asked users for their opinions on four concepts, including a Wingman prototype.
The accelerator was built around immersion in human-centered design. Together, my team and I conducted interviews to understand how young adult men experience sexual health and digital intimacy in their day-to-day lives.
In workshops in Chicago and Dallas, we explored countless ideas and developed several concepts — beginning with a gamified sexual health app. We made several pivots along our journey before landing on Wingman and homing in on a keyboard that could meet young people in the exact moments they need it most.
Out of all participating innovation teams, one was selected to further develop its prototype with IDEO. Our team was chosen.
We worked alongside IDEO designers in their San Francisco studios, first participating in analogous research and interviews and then collaborating on feature ideation and rapid prototypes. Our team split responsibilities across research, tech, and design; I contributed to the visual design of brand prototypes and co-led a few interviews.
While we returned to the East Coast to seek out developers, IDEO continued refining brand and data strategies, developing Wingman’s technical approach, logos, marks, typography, tagline, and verbal identity.
Pictured is me, right, leading a prospective user, left, through a card-sorting activity I designed with IDEO, in his home in San Francisco, CA, September 2019. We asked the user to rank features of a conceptual app that enhanced digital intimacy. Photo credit: Tynan Collins, IDEO.
To bring Wingman to life, we partnered with MELT Studio. To these ends, I created interface mockups and interaction concepts so that their developers could translate our concept into a functional app.
At the same time, I extended IDEO’s brand strategy into promotional materials, designing a website and social presence built around the manifesto authored by Stu Getty and writing product features and marketing copy that translated its voice into product and feature descriptions.
As the product and brand took shape, we began preparing to bring the idea to market. With support from Seed Spot, we refined our investor pitch. I contributed to narrative development and led visual design for the deck, and we ultimately presented Wingman to the manufacturers of Trojan Condoms.
Alongside this work, I partnered with legal counsel to establish and protect our intellectual property; in 2024, our team was granted a patent.
Wingman harnesses large amounts of open-source data and uses machine learning to analyze conversational tone in real time. As users type, the keyboard evaluates suggestiveness, showing when conversations heat up with an on-screen thermometer and subtle haptic cues.
Wingman then suggests the right words at the right times. Friendly words for friendly times. Flirty words for flirty times. And sexy words for sexy times.
As conversations progress, Wingman’s quick, accessible how-tos help users navigate hard-to-talk-about topics like STI status, pleasure and fantasies, desires and boundaries, condom preferences, and more.
With its patent secured and design validated, we are now focused on refinement, reactivation, and relaunch — seeking funding to support updates, including a critical fix to its core feature.
We built Wingman by centering young people’s experiences over policy assumptions, using human-centered design to test, pivot, and refine the idea until it reflected how young men want conversations to happen.
And that’s the point: by learning how to have these hard conversations, young men can better understand themselves, build stronger connections, and yes, have better sex.