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Breaking down the brilliant and simple design of Tinder
Why the application is so good at hooking you in.
Swipe, swipe, and swipe.
On the surface, Tinder is as superficial as it gets as an application. You’re there to meet others and match with people you deem attractive enough you want to connect with.
However, how Tinder is designed as a mobile application is extremely smart and simple.
Although there are so many other applications like Bumble, Hinge, and more in the market today, Tinder is still known as the original dating application for mobiles. Ironically many of these applications are owned by parent company Match, which has a global monopoly of pretty much all major online dating services.
But we’re here to see how Tinder managed to dominate the dating industry with a simple yet effective design strategy.
Let’s take a look at some of the concepts they employed.
The “Swipe Right” concept
Jonathan Badeen, the co-founder of Tinder, created the “swipe right” concept. This simple action has created such simplicity and helped bring the high levels of engagement Tinder receives.
In a Quora post, he answered himself, Baaden explains that his priority was to get users quickly from Point A to Point B. Historically, dating was a long process where users would create long and drawn-out profiles.
Tinder was to do the exact opposite of this.
Original iterations on Tinder did not actually have the swipe right function and was instead filled with buttons. It would be a fateful morning when Badeen would be wiping the fog away from the bathroom mirror when he discovered how natural the action of swiping right is for everyone. As we know, the rest is history.
Badeen further explained that Tinder’s purpose was to get users to stay on the app as long as possible, so simplifying the match process meant users didn’t need much guidance to use the app. This meant the application itself was sticky from the…
