4 ways I’ve fucked up as a designer 😬

1. That time I got single Indonesians to hate me

When Tinder pioneered the card interface, back then it made sense to accompany the cards with yes/no buttons. Those buttons served as a backup option in case people didn’t figure out how to swipe the cards.

Tinder

A few years later, the card interface became so widespread that you could find a job or an apartment only by swiping cards.

So, when I was redesigning the Home screen for Paktor (Southeast Asia’s largest dating app) in 2014, I decided to strip those yes/no buttons because everyone knows how to swipe a card, right?

I made gazillion versions, and exactly zero of them had yes/no buttons. What was I even thinking.

Wrong. As soon as we rolled out the new cards, Indonesia suddenly forgot how to swipe. Wait, wut? Our AB test results were telling us that Singapore and other tech savvy markets had no problem with my sudden outburst of minimalism, but the numbers in Indonesia dropped significantly.

A whole country, overnight, simply forgot how to swipe. That was the moment when many single Indonesians collectively thought “Mati aja lo, Nina”. I totally ruined their day. Pretty sure someone was minutes away from finding the love of their life, but no, Nina decided to try something cool, and effectively cockblocked a whole country.

So… Why was only Indonesia affected? As it turns out, different markets are at different phases of design evolution. That means markets which joined the internet or smartphone revolution a bit later, are now going through early stages of familiarization, and can‘t simply jump into advanced concepts like pull-to-refresh or swipe-to-dismiss. It takes a bit more guidance and clear affordance to effectively communicate an action.

Takeaway: When releasing one product for multiple drastically different markets, always design with the least advanced market in mind.

2. That time I created art instead of design

3. That time I tried to design a font, but ended up with 26 circles instead

4. That time I turned into the client from hell