Simply Swipe Them

Purpose

Built an app where you swipe through your contacts in 8 directions to sort them into categories. Tinder uses 2 directions (left/right). Simply Swipe Them uses 8 — up, down, left, right, and all four diagonals — each mapped to a label you define. Hot contacts go right, cold go left, family goes up, acquaintances go down-left. The swiping IS the sorting.

Stack

What I Learned

• Eight-directional swiping is a UI pattern that does not exist in any other app I have seen. Most swipe UIs are binary (Tinder: left/right) or unidirectional (scroll: up/down). Eight directions give you 8 simultaneous classification options per card — a massive throughput increase for categorization tasks. The tradeoff: 8 directions require muscle memory. The first 20 swipes are slow. By swipe 50, it is instinctive.
• Gesture recognition for 8 directions requires calculating the angle of the swipe vector (atan2(dy, dx)), dividing the circle into 8 sectors of 45 degrees each, and snapping to the nearest sector. A swipe at 30 degrees maps to "right." A swipe at 80 degrees maps to "up-right." The math is simple. The UX challenge is making the feedback clear enough that users know which sector they hit.
• iOS Contacts API (CNContactStore) gives read/write access to the user's contact database — names, phone numbers, emails, photos, notes, groups. Simply Swipe Them reads contacts, displays them as cards, and writes classification labels back to the contact's notes or custom groups. The contact database becomes the persistence layer. No separate database needed.
• The app is published and works for contact sorting. But the future vision is much bigger: the swipeable entity should be configurable. Swap contacts for email drafts and the 8 directions become template assignments. Swap for design assets and the directions become vertical placements. Swap for support tickets and the directions become priority/assignment. The 8-directional swipe is a universal rapid-classification interface.

Key Insights

• The evolution from "contact sorter" to "universal classification interface" is the same pattern as StartNote (note timer → progress tracker) and Explore The Cell (cell biology → 22 games spanning particles to infinity). The first version solves one specific problem. The insight reveals the general pattern. The general pattern is always more valuable than the specific solution.
• Swapping labeling with workflow execution is the key insight for the future version. Instead of swiping to assign a label (passive), swipe to trigger an action (active): swipe right = send this email template, swipe up = assign to design team, swipe down-left = archive with tag. The gesture becomes a command, not just a classification. This transforms Simply Swipe Them from an organizational tool into a workflow accelerator.
• Eight-directional input is underexplored in mobile UX because most designers assume users cannot reliably target more than 4 directions on a touchscreen. The data from Simply Swipe Them suggests otherwise: with visual feedback (directional highlights as the finger moves) and generous angular thresholds (45 degrees per sector), users hit the intended direction consistently after a brief learning period. The constraint was assumed, not tested.
• The App Store listing for Simply Swipe Them under Brett Owers — alongside Tater Dash, Intervalition, and the other published apps — continues building the personal brand SEO signal. Each app is another indexed page on a high-authority domain (apps.apple.com) with "Brett Owers" in the developer field.