The Brand’s
in the Gesture
Do you know what Tinder looks like? Are you under the age of 35? Yes? You’ve almost certainly heard of Tinder. How about under 30, single and living in a major metropolis? There’s a good chance you’re an active Tinder user, searching for love no more than a quarter mile away. Under 25? You’re probably not reading anymore, instead spending your time swiping through Tinder.
For an ever-growing group of users, Tinder occupies prime home-screen real estate on their devices and eats up large blocks of time throughout the day. It should be an easy question: What does Tinder look like?
Without looking at your phone, can you accurately describe Tinder’s color palette? How about the logo? Is the UI flat or rich with gradients? Harder to remember than you’d think, right?
So, why isn’t the look of the dominant mobile dating service etched into the retinas of its daily users? Because the strength of Tinder’s brand has very little to do with the service’s look — and has everything to do with its feel.
Unlike, say, Facebook’s universally-recognizable shade of blue (or Twitter’s blue or Linkedin’s blue…) the exact graphic elements that make up Tinder’s brand kit has contributed very little to its traction. Instead, The DNA of Tinder’s brand is embedded in the simple gestures that make it so addictive — swipe left to ditch and right to keep, repeat many times per day, everyday.
It’s no wonder it’s hard to recall visual branding (and why the visual identity carries so little weight) when the service is designed to produce compulsive muscle memory rather than visual recognition.
As product designers, what should we take away from Tinder’s example and other applications that have succeeded in defining ownable, gesture-based brands? First, a clear need to rethink the design process for mobile, digital products by placing equal weight on invention on the one side and, on the other, efficient, process-driven delivery. At Mayday — where we spend a quarter of our time working with entrepreneurs building businesses around B2C and B2B digital products — we once treated brand design, information architecture, user experience and visual design as distinct phases, one phase growing out of the previous. While it’s orderly and clear for clients and staff to understand, adhering to that process is no longer enough.
Now, with the goal in mind to craft instantly-recognizable experience design that is synonymous with the product’s identity, we need to blur the lines in our process — branding, experience design and visuals need to be addressed holistically rather than sequentially. Through the process, we need to stop and ask some important questions about the experiences we’re creating: “Is this interaction new?” “Is this interaction unique?” And, most important, “Is this interaction uniquely recognizable and sticky enough to drive brand recognition?” When the product’s brand depends on the strength of the product’s core gesture, the gesture better be good.
