I've seen a few "Tinder for <X>" apps out there that try to emulate the swipe model for things like hiring, events, business connections, etc. I haven't found any of them useful; I think they overgeneralize the Tinder model.
Tinder works because the criteria the user is selecting for, physical attractiveness, really can be evaluated in a split second from a single photo.
On the other hand, the question of "do I want to hire this person" requires carefully evaluating their skills, credentials, education, location, availability. "Do I want to go to this event" depends on the kind of event, location, time, and other plans I might have that day. In both cases the photo is irrelevant. Once you have to look through each item for 10-20 seconds bare minimum, the Tinder model doesn't make sense anymore.
Another key UI consideration is filtering. In the hiring and events examples, you can easily filter algorithmically by skills, years of experience, event type, or location. But physical attractiveness can't be algorithmically filtered on. So Tinder occupies a unique niche where the selection criteria is 1) impossible to automate because it's vague and subjective but 2) easy for each individual user to evaluate in a split second.
The secret to Tinder's success isn't that they use a swipe-based interface. It's that they solved one of the biggest pain points in dating: users never have to talk to anyone that hasn't already expressed mutual interest in them. Since the app discloses romantic interest only after both parties have reciprocated, Tinder offers a fundamentally better way of meeting new people than has existed previously. That was a game-changer for the entire dating scene, and that is why they are successful.
AFAIK dating websites had such a feature years before Tinder. Mutual selection as "favorite" or something like that leading to revelation of that selection to both isn't new at all.
It isn't the mutual selection alone, but that feature in combination with swiping (basically a first impression) and inability to go back make it substantially different than dating sites.
To my knowledge dating sites usually have pages of profiles you search though. If you see someone you select, but say you go through 5 pages and no one catches your eye but you're out of matches. You may be willing to go back through and lower your standards to make some matches.
This is also aided by Tinder being a more dynamic app. The number of people that are active(discoverable) changes day to day, whereas a dating site is essentially static; with only new users adding more potential matches.
There are so many holes in this piece it's amazing. It's especially apparent when it's boiled down by the author:
"There are many reasons why this makes for a better user experience:
1.Cognitively, you can only evaluate one option at a time. Seeing all the options laid out in front of you at once is just noisy and distracting, since you’ll have to consider each one in turn anyway.
2.Making swipe-happy snap judgements allows you to make better choices, faster. See Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking for much more on the adaptive unconscious.
3.You can do it one handed."
There's no reference to cognitive theories dealing with various interface types. I'm doing an independent project this semester with user eye-tracking through a Netflix-like interface. Iris Vessey's theory of Cognitive Fit shows that there are some tasks where the-part-in-relation-to-the-whole is the main consideration. In those cases, a matrix interface is a better fit, leading to better (faster, more accurate) task performance.
2. Malcolm Gladwell as main reference? ...no wonder no cognitive theory was explored.
3. Why stop there, you could also do that with blinks or eye gestures, further isolated into a bubble of laziness.
I mean Netflix's interface sucks for discovery, and the suggested improvement in the article is to force me to look at one suggested movie at a time? Seriously!?
Any claims for discovery efficiency is a lie. Shitty UX's "convert better" due in part to the way that they hurt their users.
Netflix cannot let you discover there is nothing you want to watch in their entire catalogue because you will unsubscribe. They have to make you believe there is more that you have not found.
Similar to Amazon, they cannot make search so efficient that you have the time and energy to search other sites or price compare. The strategy is to make sure they are the first place you visit and then exhaust you to the point you settle with what they have to offer.
> Netflix cannot let you discover... They have to make you believe there is more that you have not found.
That's an insightful observation and explains perfectly why Netflix does not provide a simple straight list of all titles that you can scroll through. I'll bet that the Netflix engineers have wanted to add such an obvious feature, but someone in marketing yelled, "Don't!"
If you ask the average non-techie user how many titles their Neflix subscription has, they'll be astonished to hear that it's only ~7750 in the US and even less in other countries (eg., ~4478 in Canada)[1]. Even though this information is easy to discover, it seems that most people don't bother to know.
The other thing I've noticed having recently trialled Netflix in Australia is that they seem to push TV series harder than movies. I guess if you watch a movie, you're done in a couple of hours. If you get hooked on a TV series, you might be watching episode after episode for a number of seasons.
7,750 is a shockingly low number for a service like Netflix, but I guess it reflects the fact that most movies aren't really that good and you'd probably only be interested in watching a maximum of 10k titles over your lifetime, maybe 15,000 hours / 2 years of content
I think you're confusing search intent with discovery intent.
Of course Netflix isn't going to stop showing you movie options when you're trying to discover something new. If the user doesn't intentionally know what they want to watch, they need to continually see content to discover it.
And Amazon search isn't terrible because of a price-hiding scheme, it's because they have a terrible UI company-wide, from the Kindle to EC2. People typically aren't browsing Amazon to discover new products - they search and move on. Are you suggesting that Amazon search should be an internet price aggregator too?
It seems like you're playing the Halloween music early by saying these companies have terrible UX as a complex ploy to keep you engaged while not giving you what you want. The reality is that they have wide userbases which are fickle to UI changes, and it takes time and research to roll out anything new.
Amazon may not be intentionally malicious. When you make decisions only on a metric like sale conversions, you will be optimising other factors you are not even aware of. Nothing necessitates that the best UX and happiest customers will be the most profitable.
For example, I recall a story about Amazon trialling infinite scroll. It had positive customer feedback and users viewed more products compared to pagination. However, sale conversions dropped so obviously it was never rolled out. Was it a better browsing experience? Possibly, but that isn't the metric Amazon is optimising for so it just doesn't matter. I expect that there is a threshold where any time saved for a user searching Amazon is not spent buying more products from Amazon but spent on competitor sites.
Missing design targets because you're optimizing on the wrong metrics is a real problem - but for Amazon to be unintentionally making their search so overly complex to keep users bogged down (as you say) it would require them to be optimizing on number of searches, not sales conversions or revenue.
I think even you can admit that sounds just a little absurd.
They will optimise for probability of a search leading to purchases and likely see 5s searches leading to fewer purchases than 90s searches.
You get the same phenomena in retail. You get intentionally confusing layouts in shops, hidden exits, difficult placement of essentials and related items spread at different ends of the store, no clocks etc. to maximise the amount of time a customer spends in their store. It works.
Following this "small data" concept I was also working on an app that works with a kind of "binary communication". You guys (and girls) seem quite critical, so I'd be really curious to hear what you guys think of this concept (sorry if this is considered self promotion, it just seemed appropriate to mention it here.)
The idea is a messaging app where recipients can only reply Yes or No, and is intended for quick questions when you don't need an excuse (i.e. "Have you sent the file yet?"), the idea is to gear for wearables and provide a swappable tinder like interface for quick questions.
http://www.getmoshimoshi.com
Nice site and nice app design. I think the app has some merit but your challenge will be finding fun/obvious use-cases that are strong enough to get entire groups of people downloading it. Planning a night out seems to be one challenge no app has adequately solved so I'd steer clear, but the angle of convincing groups of people to join for outfit reviews is stronger. I could see girls using it in change rooms before buying clothes, or getting ready to go to a party or whatever.
Hi, Thank you!
Yeah the idea is for every day quick questions like outfit reviews etc. Things that you just need an immediate "yes or no" answer to. The concept is to keep conversation short, sweet and to the point.
It's mainly targeted at millennials. I know it's a bit buggy but it you got some time, I'd really appreciate it if you could play around with the app and possibly give it a review! Thanks again! :)
Thank! That's really encouraging to hear! :)
Yeah, in order for apps like these to be useful they need to be on as many devices/platforms as possible.
Re just launched a few days ago on the Play store, so will be uploading to the Amazon store soon too.
Its still first release so you will run into some bugs, but we are working through them as we speak! Thanks again for downloading! :)
Alan Kay once said something to the effect of: the best UIs are the ones that make the process of rejection as fast as possible.
So, “yes”, Tinder-like apps are the way of the future, but we could have been living in the future a long time ago if people had been paying more attention to the lessons of the past.
I really hope not. For anyone not above average looking, Tinder, et al, are a bunch of apps that basically show you everyone in your area that would never talk to you. I'm fairly positive that at least in my area, anyone who even matches with me is a robot.
There are a tonne of average-to-poor looking girls on Tinder who have very good photos of themselves that paint them in a much more flattering light than they really deserve. Take a leaf out of their book.
Tinder is the most superficial distillation of dating out there, your entire judgement of the person is based on a few photos (and often just the first one).
You need 4 photos, show them in this order:
One full body shot of you with a clear image of your face,
one of you topless (if you have the body for it),
one of you looking cool with your friends, and one of you doing something you like, preferably some sort of adventurous hobby like climbing or diving
PAY TO GET PROFESSIONAL PHOTOS DONE. I can't emphasize this enough, more than anything else this will drastically improve your results.
The 'about me' field is almost irrelevant. Keep it to 3 sentences or less. When you get a match, push for a meetup at a bar (or your house if you feel bold) as soon as possible, preferably within 24 hours. Get their actual phone number within the first five messages. THE GIRL ALREADY LIKES YOU, there is no need to play silly games at this point.
I also use a Tinderbot to automatically like all the girls. I wrote my own version based off the work of somebody who reverse-engineered the API, my repo is here https://github.com/samphilipd/tinderzapper . When I feel like going on some dates, I just run that for a few days, unlike all the unattractive matches and push for meetups with the rest. It's a pure numbers game.
BELIEVE ME there are girls out there who will find you attractive and want to meet up with you, you simply have to sift through the junk to find them.
The above is pretty much exactly what I do. I'm only slightly above-average looking and very below-average height (5ft4). I do workout so I have a somewhat decent body. I've been on countless dates this year and got laid with 10-15 girls just through tinder.
Anyone can get a date on Tinder with professionally taken photos. In fact, most of the girls on there already know the importance of photos and are very skilled at showing photos that present them in the best possible light.
Are you able to date successfully as an unattractive person without Tinder?
Maybe in the future Tinder should segment its users better so that attractive people are presented to other attractive people, and the plebs stay in their own pool, but it seems more appropriate to just abandon anyone without the resources to make themselves attractive to solitude.
After all, there soon won't be enough jobs for everyone anyway; the growing acceptance of polyamory combined with the divorce (pun not intended) of marriage from its religious basis means we can expect polygamy and polyandry to be legal within our lifetime; as more and more of the world becomes hyper-unequal, why do we expect dating to be any different?
Of course, this is a totally unrelated tangent to the article, which was about the card swiping interface and the advantages therein, but let's not expect an unequal world to be equal in some respects.
This is so dumb...
One paragraph they're introducing the concept of "small data", the next paragraph they're talking about how getting the swipe information for huge numbers of users helps them train their collaborative filtering algorithm...
Ultimately it's a big data hype article... GASP we can infer your preferences from your behavior... Written by someone with a Medium tagline of "Sassy futurism. Tech and words."
That is not at all dumb. Doing the preference learning for a huge number of users lets you set up a prior over the preferences that includes correlations between different attributes. Then you use the population prior together with the data for the individual to get the posterior for their personal preferences, which will then take into account the correlations revealed in the population data. This is what we do with http://findmelike.com where we perform the Bayesian update over the user's preferences after every user interaction.
Tinder works because the criteria the user is selecting for, physical attractiveness, really can be evaluated in a split second from a single photo.
On the other hand, the question of "do I want to hire this person" requires carefully evaluating their skills, credentials, education, location, availability. "Do I want to go to this event" depends on the kind of event, location, time, and other plans I might have that day. In both cases the photo is irrelevant. Once you have to look through each item for 10-20 seconds bare minimum, the Tinder model doesn't make sense anymore.
Another key UI consideration is filtering. In the hiring and events examples, you can easily filter algorithmically by skills, years of experience, event type, or location. But physical attractiveness can't be algorithmically filtered on. So Tinder occupies a unique niche where the selection criteria is 1) impossible to automate because it's vague and subjective but 2) easy for each individual user to evaluate in a split second.