Pinterest Concept: Obtaining Accurate Feeds Through Emoji Reactions
My brain is always anxious when it comes to making decisions, no matter deciding on what to paint or where to eat. That’s probably the reason why I rely so much on Pinterest for gathering ideas and setting a clearer direction to go for. Scanning through hundreds and thousands of pins surely helps, but it is hard to ensure every pin that the user sees serves meaningful connotations.
Although Pinterest has constantly recommended interesting home feeds and generated search results, getting truly personalized recommendations is still a challenge.
I thought…
How might Pinterest receive responses and feedback on home feeds from its users? How might this enable Pinterest to provide more accurate feeds?
Pinterest Feeds Does Not Match Users’ Taste
I originally hypothesized: Users constantly get irrelevant posts because they are not clear how to get rid of them. My mind changed after interviewing people from different target groups.
Understanding Why People Are Not Getting Accurate Feeds
User Research
- Most users refused to respond to the pins they dislike.
“I simply ignore the pins that I don’t like.”
Users scroll pass the pins. This is a missed opportunity for Pinterest to generate more accurate feeds. These disturbing contents could be removed if Pinterest knew that users are not interested in them.
2. Users do not pin everything they are interested in to boards.
“Sometimes I just scan through the images for quick ideas.”
“Sorting every pin onto boards is time consuming.”
A large portion of home feeds are based on pins that users save. Pinterest will lost potential pins that interest its users if they stop pinning.
3. Users prefer easier and more interactive means to react.
“I want to interact more with interesting pins, but I feel uncomfortable to comment on strangers.”
There is no incentive to interact with pins. The hide pin button hardly allows users to interact with one another. They felt awkward leaving comments on pins created by strangers, and there is no way to indicate their feelings about the pins through simpler means.
I observed that users are not responding to the pins because skipping the pins they dislike is easier, or they can’t express their feelings about the pins through simple means.
Redefining the People Problem
When Pinterest recommends content based on user’s saved or liked posts, they don’t have enough information to generate accurate feeds.
This is because:
- Users can’t easily respond to pins
2. Users don‘t consistently respond to pins
People Prefer Easier Ways to React
Initially, I thought users are not willing to react or provide feedback at all. However, when they are given motivations and simpler ways to react, users DO want to put in the effort to improve their feeds.
Brainstorming
I recruited my friend, Elaine Zhu, an architecture student and an active Pinterest user, to join my brainstorming session.
We decided on two main areas of improvement:
- Make feeds more personalized: How might we enable the app to recommend more accurate feeds to its users?
- Make reactions easier and more interesting: How might we ensure that users react to pins more often?
Identifying Which Feature to Implement
After brainstorming and filtering solutions through analyzing their impact and feasibility, I drew out some initial flows to visualize my ideas and conduct user testing.
Hide Button at Home Page
The hide button is moved to the left corner of each pin. Users can access the hide button easily. While hide button enables direct response to the “hated pins”, users might accidentally click on the button — this increases inaccuracy.
Rate the Pin
This feature allows the user to rate each pin on a scale from 1–5 according to the relevance of the pin. After user interview, I realized that although rating by numbers ensures accurate analysis of feedback, users do not have the motivation to keep reacting.
Emoji Reactions
Emoji reactions allow the user to react to each pin through clicking on emojis. It enables users to react through more personalized means. One important development consideration for this feature would be whether users should be able to see others’ reactions or not.
Looking At How Other Apps Get User Responses
Apps use similar means to enable user to respond to content. I realized how most apps enable only (or mostly) positive reactions towards the pins.
Initially, I wanted to work on the hide button, since I thought it has the highest feasibility and enables direct response to the “hated pins”. However, after research I discovered that there is actually a reason for Pinterest to conceal the hide button — positive feedbacks are more effective than negative in generating accurate content for the user. Hence, I went on to think about my initial goal of choosing the hide button feature — prevent the pins that the users dislike to appear, and generate more accurate and personalized feeds.
Initial Approach
After considering findings from research, we decided on an opportunity:
Emoji Reactions: enabling the users to interact more naturally and enabling the app to collect users’ responses. Users are able to see others’ reactions, which adds a social aspect to Pinterest.
Why emojis, not other rating systems? Emojis enable more personalized interactions as they feature different emotions. They are easy to understand and FUN to use.
Content Development Considerations
Emojis need to best represent the users’ reaction on Pinterest — We need to consider how the mental models of users using Pinterest are different from those of other social media Apps users.
Pinterest is NOT a social platform — Emojis could possibly enable more interaction between users and foster a sense of community on the good side, but it should not direct Pinterest away from a primarily content focused platform to a social media platform.
Five Emojis I’ve Settled On💡
Like, Amazed, Haha, Bored, Dislike
The data collected from users’ reactions could be used to improve Pinterest’s recommendation algorithms. Pinterest could chose to decrease the weight of pins that the users found bored and dislike, and add weights to those being marked Like, Amazed, and Haha.
Design Iterations
Determining Entry Points
Option 1: Entry point at home page right below the pin
Pros: Easy access to emoji reactions could increase response rate.
Cons: The size of emojis are too small as the design is constrained by the limited space between the pins, it is hard for users to tap with their fingers accurately. In addition, placing the entry point right below the pin could distract the user’s attention away from content.
Option 2: Entry point at the pin page(after the user clicks on the pin)
Pros: Users could solely focus on contents at home page, as their attention would not be directed away by the emojis.
Cons: Users need to access the pin page first in order to react. This means potentially biased responses might be collected — users clicks on the pin usually when they have positive feelings towards the content.
Option 3: Long press the pin at home page in order to access the entry point
Pros: It allows relatively easy access and it does not drive user’s attentions away from focusing the content when they are glancing through an ocean of pins.
Cons: There is a risk that first time users might not be aware of this entry point.
Entry point For Emoji Reactions(Option 3)
Ensuring Constant Response Through Emoji Reactions
A crucial goal of the emoji reaction feature is to ensure users’ constant response to pins. In this way, Pinterest could keep track of users’ changing tastes and hence provide the most accurate and valuable feeds for them.
Option 1: Automatic pop-up of the “More like this” section after positive reactions(“Like”, “Haha”, or “Amazed”)
Pros: The user will be able to view more pins that are similar to what they are responding to right now immediately after they react. This feature will hint the user that Pinterest are using their response to generate more accurate feeds.
Cons: It could be annoying and time consuming for users to wait for the section to pop up every time. Users might not want to see similar pins all at once.
Option 2: Viewing how friends and other users react — only positive reactions are shown to the users. Negative ones are only being used as data to improve feeds.
Pros: Aside from being able to express their own feeling towards the pins, users might be interested to see how other Pinterest users think about the content. In addition, users will be more inclined to keep reacting when their reactions are shown public. It increases interaction with a wider range of people and enables users to find people with similar tastes easily.
Cons: Adding a social aspect to Pinterest could be risky, as the platform’s initial aim was to focus on content.
I went with Option 2 since viewing each others’ reactions and tastes helps to foster a sense of community — this increases user stickiness for the platform. The fact that users could find someone that share similar tastes motivates users to actively share their opinions. Users could find valuable content and resources via these individuals and ensures a positive cycle of content discovery.
Understanding Pinterest’s Visual Design
Moving on to high fidelity, I explored more variations of UI design for emojis and viewing reactions.
UI Kit
Emojis
I designed the five emojis for my feature. The emojis consist of flat simple shapes and maximizes the use of single colored space, which aligns with Pinterest’s aesthetics in creating icons.
Visual Design For Viewing Reactions
I chose Option 4 since it enables user to see each others’ reactions and their “friendship” status at the same time. Users can easily notice any individual that shares similar tastes with them outside of their community. They can follow them simply through clicking on the “Follow” icon — this increases interaction between users.
Introducing My Final Prototype💡
I created a prototype to showcase how users would interact with the feature reallistically.
Looking Forward🌟
Pinterest is already a successful App for users to explore diverse content and find inspiration. However, users hardly interact with content — they directly sort them into different boards.
There is potential for Pinterest to curate better feeds for its users. With Emoji Reactions, Pinterest can enable more interactions between the user and the content, and generate more personalized feeds for users through analyzing their responses.
Thanks for scrolling down! ;)
I felt lucky over the past ten weeks to enter a completely new realm of product design. It was a first ever experience for me to think from a product designer’s perspective. I look forward to continuing my story with product design.
This is a case study created for Digital Product Design. I am in no way affiliated with Pinterest.
