Jonathan Badeen had just gotten out of the shower and was trying to clear the fog from the bathroom mirror.

He swiped his hand across the mirror first one way.

Then, as the fog began to creep back in, he swiped his hand the other way.

Seeing his face there, on the small swatch of exposed reflective surface, it hit him that

this swiping motion might be the solution to a problem that he was facing at work.

Bedeen was the chief strategy officer at a fledgling dating app company called Tinder,

and at the time he was trying to figure out how to allow app users to more intuitively navigate

through all the information that the app would present to them about potential matches.

They'd settled on a user interface that looked something like a stack of cards, with the information

for each person truncated so that it fit cleanly on an individual card, allowing you to see

everything about a potential match all at once on a smartphone screen. But the mechanisms they'd tried

for shuffling through those cards had not really worked as well as they had hoped. Nothing seemed

quite right. This story of how the now common swipe navigation method came to be very well might

be apocryphal, kind of a convenient

creation myth for what was actually the consequence of a dozen user interface developers

working together and iterating this concept over time. The world of business is full of such

stories because they help reinforce the brand, and because it makes for a more

compelling and memorable story to tell the press, then the boring tale of a group of people

iterating something in a more standard and forgettable way. Whatever the case may be, though,

the swipe changed everything, or at least this specific use case for it did.

Swipe-based user interfaces already existed within other apps back in 2012, when Tinder first

became available as the newest of many smartphone-based dating services. But for this particular

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