Team Pinterest

This was a concept project I worked on with a team of fellow UX designers during my time in General Assembly’s UX Design Immersive. We were tasked with finding an opportunity for improvement within Pinterest’s existing mobile app.

First steps included:

Heuristic Evaluation (LEMErS Framework)

• We evaluated the learnability, efficiency, memorability, error management, and user satisfaction of Pinterest’s mobile app

Competitive Feature Inventory

• We compared key features across 3 direct competitors of Pinterest (Instagram, Fancy and Houzz)

Comparative Task Analysis

• We compared indirect competitors of Pinterest such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Spotify to assess how each app handles user control of home feeds

Takeaways following our initial analyses:

• Pinterest has the most convoluted process for customizing a user’s home feed

• Pinterest doesn’t overwhelm users with extraneous features, unfamiliar elements, or a messy interface

• Only 2 - 3 clicks maximum are required to “pin” an image

Following our initial research, we began conducting user interviews.

Some patterns that emerged:

• users viewed Pinterest as the least “social” of the social media apps

• few users utilized Pinterest as a way to follow friends

• users voiced feeling frustrated, uninspired, and perplexed by the images populating their home feeds

• it didn’t seem to occur to users that they might have control over the kinds of images populating their home feeds

It got us thinking…

How might we create a more intuitive experience for users to control and adjust the types of images they see on their home feeds?

We used the key takeaways from the user interviews to develop a user persona:

Ava is newly engaged and uses Pinterest to save ideas for her upcoming nuptials. She likes to unwind at the end of a long day by scrolling mindlessly through the app and saving wedding-related images that inspire her. She also uses Pinterest to save ideas for work, so when she scrolls through her feed hoping for wedding inspiration, she might see primarily work-related images populating her home feed.

Ava needs a better way to curate her home feed, because she feels uninspired and frustrated when she sees pins that are irrelevant to her.

Early sketches included pie charts, percentage bars, and gamification, but none of these ideas felt quite right. We felt these visuals might be too unfamiliar to users, off-brand for Pinterest, or just too mathematical. Our users wanted to relax, not calculate percentages. 

Finally, we created a user flow and got to work usability testing the mobile prototype…

Goal:

• Users will be able to view relevant pins by customizing their home feed in under 2 minutes.

Logistics:

• Conducted via video call

• Moderated

Participant Age Range:

• 20-40 years

User Scenario:

• You use Pinterest for work and personal browsing. While at work this morning, you were searching for and pinning images to your work-specific boards. Now, you’re home from work and want to see wedding inspiration, but you open the app and see a work-related pin on your home feed.

Task:

• Click through the prototype and show me what you would do to browse your home feed without seeing work-related pins.

Metrics:

Quantitative: Users will be able to complete the task in under 2 minutes.

Qualitative: Users will feel that the task was understandable and easy to accomplish.

We found that the test participants were getting very confused by both the task and the design.

To remedy this, we simplified the task and how we presented it verbally to testers. We also simplified the design. While our team loved the idea of the “bubble” visual, we realized we needed to let function inform our design. This resulted in switching the editing functionality from bubbles to toggles.

Key Takeaways:

• Sometimes, you just need to “kill your darlings”. You may love a design, but if it doesn’t work for your users, it might as well not work at all.

• When in doubt, just K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Silly!)

Research Insights:

• The thing users really seem to appreciate about this particular social media app is that it isn’t very social! They like that the content is geared toward their likes and interests, and doesn't revolve around what their friends are doing.

• For the most part, users had no idea how to customize their home feeds. In some cases, it never even occurred to them that it might be possible.

Challenges:

• Lining users up for interviews and testing can be a challenge, especially when you are trying to recruit users you don’t know. Luckily, one of our team members had a large social media following of people he wasn’t closely acquainted with, so we were able to pull from that group of people for user interviews and usability tests.

Favorite Step in the Design Process:

• While I normally enjoy the more visual aspects of the process, on this particular project I found myself “diversifying” a bit. I filled in gaps when there were interviews to be conducted or usability tests to be performed, and I also got to do a decent amount of writing.

Potential Next Steps:

• It would be incredibly valuable to do some interviews to establish what our users’ baseline understanding is for how their home feeds currently populate. In hindsight, we realized we made an assumption in this area.

• Depending on the information gathered from the aforementioned interviews, we would implement an onboarding tutorial or walk-through for new users, and for established users when there’s an update.

• We would conduct A/B testing to help inform certain visual design decisions.

• We realized it might be beneficial in the future to keep our testers within the same approximate age group to our interviewees. Most of the interviewees were between 18-25 years old, while our testers were all in the 25-35 age range.

“I loved working with Ellie on this project. She’s an organized and hardworking teammate who happens to be a great writer. But her positivity and level-headedness were invaluable in maintaining morale and resolving conflict.”

— Brian, Team Member + UX Designer

“Ellie was my rock during our project. She has this amazing presence that helped calm me when I was feeling stressed or anxious. She has a knack for understanding every part of the UX processes very well. We were able to lean on her in all aspects of the project and she always came through. 10/10 would love to work with her again!”

— Clay, Team Member + UX Designer