Over the last few weeks i’ve found and/or signed up for several new apps that use a card style layout with swipe right for “Hot” / “Yes” or left for “Not” / “ No” interactions.

While this is a completely reasonable pattern for things that need only superficial, subjective initial interactions on the viewers part the model fails when you are being asked on the fly to judge more complex relationships where split second decisions are not the primary gating factor (reviewing job applicants, searching for potential jobs, reviewing potential investments or determining to accept potential friends / partner requests).

One of the more interesting apps that I’ve run across, thanks to ProductHunt, is caliber.io. Im impressed with the people that have signed up thus far and my old boss James Joaquin is a prior investor. I’ve always found James to be a thoughtful and intelligent fellow so I felt confident signing up.

One of the first people that the application presented to me was an interesting person. He had a great background and skills that mirrored mine, he worked for a company I respected and seemed like an interesting person to connect with but I wanted to see more of the service before committing time and energy to a conversation.

To interact with this application I had to make an instant Hot or Not decision to say that I wanted to meet this individual or ignore them, I didn’t want to do either I just wanted to explore.

Caliber for instance pointed out to me that there is a history and you can review your No’s at any time and reconsider. That is a bridge to a good experience but it’s not quite there.

App developers, designers and product managers are adopting this model across a wide range of topics, it’s the trendy pattern of the moment (props to Tinder) but taking that model out of context because it’s a trend and applying it to other industries without the thoughfulness needed is a mistake.

Spend time thinking about what your target is going to get out of the interactions with your app. In a Hot or Not for HR model for instance there would be different models on interaction based on role. A recruiter who is keyword or phrase matching may enjoy marking candidates in this way to speed up the process but that’s just lazy.

A hiring manager should spend the time to read and digest the information from each candidate, even the bad ones. Hiring isn’t a game, it’s one of the most important jobs a founder or VP has at any moment. It’s insulting to candidates and reckless of hiring managers to treat the process in this way.

Likewise, in applications where you are putting your name / company front and center in a professional network intended to foster one to one communication this model only works to the point where you want to make contact right then.

Trends are fun and its hard to resist the lure of the shinny and ‘new’, likewise it’s always a challenge to get your product to stand out and engage users but you only want to engage them in a meaningful way though balance, thoughtfulness and interactions that add value. Otherwise you wasted everyones time and money.