“How would I know what I would want from or with them?”: Supporting A-Spec Approaches to Developing Relationships Through Online Platforms 

Online platforms have become a key avenue for forming new relationships, especially for queer individuals. However, some individuals, such as those in asexual and aromantic communities (A-Spec), seek forms of relationships that trouble existing frameworks assumed by online platforms, such as dating apps. To investigate A-Spec needs, we conducted an 8-week ARC study with 38 A-Spec participants who have used online platforms for developing relationships. Participants described a mismatch between the design of dating apps and their approach to building relationships, suggesting platform design that combines affordances of dating apps and other social platforms. We thus outline a “process-oriented” paradigm for relationship-building platforms inspired by community design suggestions, supporting participants’ process of first establishing a low-stakes relationship and then co-constructing its properties. We also argue for a “pluralized” approach to defining identity and relationship in the design of online systems, upsetting default assumptions surrounding any given label.

Citation

Kelly Wang, Ashlee Milton, Leah Namisa Rosenbloom, Erika Melder, Ada Lerner, and Michael Ann DeVito. 2026. “How would I know what I would want from or with them?’: Supporting A-Spec Approaches to Developing Relationships Through Online Platforms. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26), April 13–17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791253