Small Data: Tinder-like apps are the way of the future
medium.com
medium.com
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.
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 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!?
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.
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.
I know people with personal media servers that could easily compete with this collection (not that I'm endorsing that, just throwing it in for scale).
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.
I feel like shopping, I wonder what's on sale.
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.
I think even you can admit that sounds just a little absurd.
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.
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.
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.
You seem bitter. So here's some drive-by unwanted advice. I assume you are male:
- Hit the gym, lift weights. Eat enough to be non-scrawny. (Or lose weight, if you are currently fat.)
- Acquire currency---as a HN lurker you should at least be able to talk your way into a tech job.
- Get someone knowledgeable to help with your outfit.
- Get some nice pictures of yourself. Either practice the art of the selfie until you are good, ask a knowledgeable friend, or pay someone.
(And since they are not, you don't need to feel too bad about judging somebody by something they have at least some influence over.)
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.
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."