My Dirty Hobby

Improving a high-traffic consumer platform through long-term product design and iterative optimization

Disclaimer: Due to non-disclosure agreements with Aylo, I am limited in the amount of work I can show.

My Dirty Hobby is a large-scale consumer platform built around content discovery, creator interaction, and monetized user engagement. During my time at Aylo, I worked on MDH over a five-year period as both UI/UX Designer and later Lead UI/UX Designer, contributing to the platform’s long-term evolution across core user journeys and monetization features.

My role covered end-to-end product design across new and existing features, including user flows, interface systems, asset libraries, and large-scale UX improvements. A major milestone during this period was the complete redesign of the website, which led to a significant increase in user engagement and membership. That redesign was driven by research, testing, and iterative product design, and established a stronger foundation for future feature development.

Over time, the work extended beyond individual features into continuous product optimization — improving usability, increasing engagement, and shaping a more scalable and cohesive platform experience.

Website: www.mydirtyhobby.com

Role & Responsibilities

UI/UX Designer → Lead UI/UX Designer

  • Designed and refined user flows for new and existing features

  • Contributed to large-scale platform redesign initiatives

  • Built and maintained supporting UI asset libraries

  • Led feature design across desktop and mobile experiences

  • Optimized platform UX through research, testing, and iteration

  • Improved core engagement and monetization surfaces across the product

The Problem

As the platform evolved over time, core user journeys required modernization to support better usability, stronger engagement, and a more scalable product foundation. Several high-value areas — including notifications, favorites, creator profiles, and gifting — needed clearer interaction models, improved information hierarchy, and more effective monetization integration. This work had to balance user experience with business impact across a mature, high-traffic product.

This became especially important in the broader site redesign, where the goal was not just visual improvement, but a stronger and more effective product experience that could support continued growth.

The Problem

The work resulted in a more cohesive, functional, and visually refined platform, with improvements across engagement, membership, and feature usability. The complete website redesign contributed to a significant boost in user engagement and membership, while ongoing optimization efforts helped create a more polished and scalable consumer product.

The result was not a single redesign, but a sustained product evolution over multiple years — improving how users discover content, follow creators, receive updates, and interact with monetized features across the platform.

Key Product Initiatives

Product Research & Continuous UX Optimization
Alongside feature design, I conducted ongoing UX research and experimentation to guide long-term product improvements. This included behavioral analysis, usability evaluation, and A/B testing across key engagement surfaces of the platform.

Using analytics and user behavior data, I identified friction points in critical flows such as content discovery, creator interaction, and monetization features. These insights informed iterative improvements to interaction patterns, information hierarchy, and feature placement.

This continuous research-driven approach allowed the team to validate design decisions, reduce usability friction, and improve engagement across the platform while supporting business goals such as increased user retention and monetization.

Notifications Redesign
The notifications experience was fully revamped with a redesigned notifications drawer, real-time in-product notifications, browser push notifications, updated notification settings, and reusable templates for different notification types. The system also included context-aware content such as thumbnails, calls to action, and countdown timers.

Favorites Page Redesign
The favorites feed was redesigned with a mobile-first, content-focused approach. It introduced live-status and story visibility for favorited creators, improved onboarding logic for users with no favorites, and enabled monetized interactions such as gifting, reactions, and saving posts for later. This area was especially important because platform data showed users spent more money on favorited models than others.

Model Profile Redesign
The profile redesign focused on simplifying the experience and surfacing the most important content more effectively for the audience. This work was part of the broader full-site redesign effort.

Gifts Feature
A new virtual gifting feature was introduced, allowing users to purchase gifts using platform currency. The system included multiple price points, seasonal gifts, cross-platform sending opportunities, and creator-side visibility into received gifts through profile sections.

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