Are you tindering? Even if you’ve never participated in the dating app, you’ve probably utilized the swipe left/right user interface design somewhere. Or if you’ve never swiped, then you’ve probably clicked in a druthers-like user interface on some website (like OkCupid’s website version of its Quickmatch). Tinder is being mimicked. Tinder’s UI/UX holy grail design, the druthers swipe, has been applied to other dating apps, other apps in general, and to websites.
In the past 2 months, I’ve been investigating how online dating sites and apps engage its users. This involved reading Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance, Christian Rudder’s Dataclysm, lots of articles, and random stuff on Quora. Surprisingly, this investigation was for work, and my work has nothing to do with online dating. It’s about energy efficiency and getting utility customers engaged to save energy and interact with their utilities. Energy efficiency websites have really low engagement. I mean really low that I’ve used the analogy of the pale blue dot to describe its insignificance in the vast web universe. I figured online dating, a high engagement environment, could have some solutions and ideas to offer to improve engagement of energy efficiency websites.
Through my research, I’ve realized that many industries have borrowed from online dating sites and apps, namely Tinder. And some brands who are experimenting with native marketing have been tinderfying themselves. Tinder is prime example of something that was created for one thing that is now influencing or is being used for other things. There’s value in looking at other industries and other walks of life for great ideas. Sure, Tinder may not be the solution to online dating, and instead could be brining about the dating apocalypse, but we could all benefit from some kind of tinderfication in our busy, digital lives.
That Tingles 