Aligning with Pinterest’s long-term growth strategy, we invested in generating more native content on the platform by fostering a creator-driven ecosystem. At the forefront of these efforts was the introduction of a new, fully immersive, interactive content format that lives in streams, called Idea Pins.
After the initial beta launch, the team sought out to improve upon the format following research sessions that highlighted struggles in user comprehension around streams, in-app navigation and format placement, as well as features that were either unclear or missing from the format entirely.
We sought out to make the new format more scalable and adaptive to user needs, aligning with other teams to ensure business objectives were being met while cleaning up the user experience. We also needed to structure clear guidelines to accommodate changes to the surface’s information architecture, increasing actionability and streamlining interaction.
Working on a continuously evolving format, we wanted to be extremely mindful of any changes that would impact the objectives of other teams. We initially set out to conduct an extensive audit of the needs of various stakeholders whilst engaging with our research team to better understand how to best iterate on the designs to balance user, business and creator needs.
Within three months, we built a framework that established a new baseline for Idea Pins, clearly defining guidelines and establishing room for new features, enabling other teams to create new experiences in a more consistent and scalable way without making existing content seem outdated or inconsistent. This required extensive input from our content creation and creator management teams to clearly define safe zones for content.
As with any major changes to an existing format, impact on metrics – particularly views on detail pages and saves – were a concern, so we went through multiple rounds of testing and divided the work in several follow-up experiments to get a better understanding of the impact on changes.
The final design result is more immersive, filling a larger portion of the screen. Stacked actions on the side of the format highlight the various ways users can engage with the content. We also decided to align with the rest of the product by adding a bottom navigation in addition to new tabs at the top which allow users to switch between the new immersive formats and more traditional content.
We saw an increase in time spent on both Idea Pins and streams through the redesign. Metrics for attribution views remained stable, which was expected, as there were no major changes to any features that may have impacted these numbers. We saw a 3% increase in users taking action on Idea Pins, with 2x the amount of reactions and a 50% increase of comment engagement and 5x increase of shares amongst these users. There was a slight decrease in the amount of saves – an expected result due to the significant change to this action and its design.
