Say ‘Product Design’ and you get people thinking about what they see on the screen — the colours, illustrations, typography, and alignments.

But product design goes beyond making interfaces look beautiful. It makes products work beautifully. It solves users’ problems and helps them accomplish their goals without coming in the way.

In this post, I deep-dive into Tinder and analyse the problem it’s solving, the design philosophy behind solving this problem, and the execution of the final product.

But first, just like great product design, let’s start off with getting our fundamentals right:

What is Product Design?

Great design helps their users get things done [User goals] in the most efficient manner possible.

Particularly, it takes care of three aspects —

Utility: It solves an actual user problem Usability: It is intuitive and easy to use Delight: It evokes a positive emotional response while using the product

Are you with me so far? Yeah? Great! It looks pretty straightforward so far eh?

You’re right — it’s pretty easy to understand.

But the implementation of it is where it gets challenging, or for a passionate product designer — interesting!

Let’s start our deep dive.

Three aspects of design with Tinder

What’s Tinder? [For those who’ve just returned from a space odyssey.]

Tinder is a widely successful dating app. As of 2014, it had 50 million monthly active users with an average of 12 million matches per day. It’s 2017 and it’s safe to assume that that number is much, much, higher.

Tinder dominates 18 Western nations as the top app for dating traffic and is a prime example of great product design.

This is where you ask — “Really? Umm..I am not sure. Tell me more about its Usability, Utility and Delight — otherwise I am afraid you’re just being a smartarse!”

Here’s my answer:

Utility

Tinder works like walking into a room, looking around and subconsciously going ‘yes,no,yes,no’ while scanning people. If you give someone across the room that look and they give you that look back, you’re now both responding in the moment and that’s a match. — Sean Rad, co-founder of Tinder

Tinder has solved the basic problem of making the first move. It has replaced how two people connect in the real world and make their first move. Eyes meet, smile and start the initial conversation.

It has created value by helping people conveniently find a date. You can scan over 50 profiles in less than 2 minutes and mutually interested people can chat with each other. Isn’t this amazing? Just get set and go!

The most anxiety ridden part of dating is the crippling fear of rejection. Tinder does a wonderful job of putting you at ease with two major design hacks:

The profiles that you have swiped will never be shown again You will never know that your proposal was turned down

You only encounter the people you’ve liked if they’ve liked you back. So, even if you car-pool with Emily, 23, Co-Founder of GirlNextDoorlol.io (who you fell in love with at first sight but she didn’t) you won’t recognise her.

Usability

Tinder has a very intuitive and friction-less interface. From one tap account creation to getting a match, no extra instructions are required to move ahead. You know exactly what is happening in the app.

1. Card Stack View

Instead of following the common design pattern, which is the vertical feed (like Facebook and Twitter), Tinder uses ‘cards’ view.

Source: Giphy

A Human brain can process only a few chunks of information at a given time. Showing a lot of elements can overwhelm and distract the user. Tinder’s cards view, when compared to vertical feed, shows minimal and the most relevant information at a time. Only the information like photo, age, name and basic details are shown at first and rest of the information is disclosed progressively.

2. Focus on content

Unlike any other app, Tinder is custom designed on a plain white background with big, clear fonts and simple icons. Most of the screen is covered with a photo, eventually giving more focus on the actual content. It enhances the overall functionality of the product.

This approach is also being used by some of the leaders in design like Instagram, Medium and Airbnb. All these designs just focus on the content rather than the decorations. They have eliminated colours from the background and used them for most significant actions only.

3. Three screen interface

Every action you want to take is covered in a beautiful and swipe-able three screen interface. They have also set the right defaults by keeping the profiles as the landing screen of the app.

They could have used either the hamburger menu like Gmail or the tabular format like Facebook for navigation, which are known UI patterns, but they understood their problem right and solved it in an innovative way that took the whole usability experience to a new level.

Delight

Delight is when the app gives a pleasurable experience to the user. From giving a promising service to good copies, anything that makes your user happy comes under the umbrella of Delight.

In the case of Tinder, there are several things that made the experience pleasurable. Although swiping cards is in itself a fun experience, here are some other ways in which Tinder delights its users —

1. Friendly Copies

Good copies make huge impact in the product. They influence the user to take action. Tinder has some really friendly copies that are impactful and human.

Every time you get a match, you get fresh copies that nudge you to start a conversation. My personal favourites are —

2. Visual Design

Visual design makes for your product’s first impression. We all love beautiful looking things. Tinder has a really good photo and content focused visual design. It’s clean, minimal and organised look makes you fall in love with the product at first sight.

Brain scan studies reveal that the site of an attractive product can trigger the part of the motor cerebellum that governs hand movement, says Lance Hosey in his New York Times article, “Why We Love Beautiful Things”

3. Animations

While swiping cards or swiping between screens, Tinder has focused on the smallest animation and made them really smooth.

Have you seen the empty state, the state when there are no more profiles to show? Slow ripples coming out of your profile picture representing that the app is searching for more people around you. Look at me tap on my profile picture below! Isn’t it beautiful?

All these transitions and animations are not mandatory but become the differentiating factor.

4. Sounds

Do you feel happy when you get a match or a message? If yes, then the joyous notification sound that comes out of your phone is partly the reason behind that.

Source: Giphy

Instead of using the regular beep or alert tone, they chose to be innovative by differentiating their tone from the regular ones. When Tinder beeps, your heart flutters, sparks blow your brains and you immediately check your phone.

Evaluating other products based on the three aspects of Design

Amazon is great at utility but it’s cluttered and lousy UI makes it difficult to use. However its reliable & promising service makes it a delightful product. Then we have Airbnb and Medium that are known for their impeccable experience throughout the app. Whereas, Booking.com, while very useful, does not have a user friendly interface that delights its users.