Don’t Let Users Miss Out On What You Have to Offer
A gesture case study about Pinterest and what they missed with their on-boarding.
Myself and a team of four other UX designers in training were tasked with a case study about the gestures used in an app of our choice. After some talking we decided to focus our study on Pinterest. All of us had some experience with Pinterest, and we thought it had some unique gestures that were not found in other apps. So let’s dive in and I will teach you how Pinterest (and many other apps) are letting a large portion of their audience miss out on a great user experience.
INTRODUCTION TO OUR CASE STUDY
OUR APP: Pinterest is an app designed to discover information on the web, mostly through photos and gifs. It allows a user to collect “pins” with designs, photos, memes, or other information to boards which can be organized any way a user likes. Users can have followers and follow other people, and it is a good organizational, informational search and social media platform combined into one.
OUR EXPERIMENT’S PURPOSE: We as designers know that gestures are important. We want to figure out just how important they are to a user experience. The entire purpose of this experiment is to study the gestures used on Pinterest, discover the gesture differences between platforms (iOS vs Android), why they are different, and how these differences can affect a user’s experience.
OUR GOALS/OBJECTIVES:
Find the core gestures used on Pinterest.
Determine the differences between Pinterest’s gestures on different platforms.
Learn how those differences affect a user’s experience with the app.
RESEARCH METHODS:
Web searching
Observations
Personal experiences, understandings, and discovery
Target audience information and data
CASE STUDY OUTLINE:
Task creation for study’s testing — Create journey maps and mini journeys to determine which task will be best for testing (including gestures we know are different between platforms, and a task that is easy enough to follow, but challenging enough to yield good results).
Testing — Give participants a task(s) to complete on one platform, record findings, then have then complete the same task on a different platform, record the findings, then compare between platforms.
Record Results — Quantitative (time for each task) and qualitative results (frustrations, thoughts, and feelings about the differences, and their experience).
POTENTIAL OUTCOMES: With the information we gain from our study’s results, we want to be able to create a “Gesture Design Statements” sheet of some kind. This would be almost like a gestures cheat sheet that will explain the dos and don’ts of gesture design. We want to be able to tell people how to design better gesture experiences across platforms.
OUR RESEARCH AND FINDINGS:
For our research, we found it difficult to find information about pinterest because whenever you google “pinterest” it just brings up the website or pins or articles relating to pins. It’s almost as bad as googling “google”. But we were able to dig further into search results, and do some of our own exploration to find the information we needed.
PINTEREST’S GESTURES: Pinterest’s minimalist design aids the experience of gestures. “He felt Pinterest needed a design approach that could appeal to a more diverse audience — an approach so minimalist it would train the people who use it to focus on the images they pin rather than on the icons on the page. That way, Pinterest could use the same page design to appeal to Korean men or British women — they’d be attracted by the images they discovered and saved, not turned off by the stuff around them.”
This idea corresponds to the main gesture control of saving a pin. You tap and hold on an image then drag to select the option you want. With the newest design, they have taken out a lot of metadata and also adjusted the fonts, giving more emphasis to the images. These larger images allow for a bigger target, or real-estate, for your fingers to perform the necessary gestures.
From this information we gathered that pinterest focuses on simplistic gestures that everyone universally understands and are easy to use. The creator didn’t want gestures that were hard, complicated, or distracting. He wanted users main focus to be on the images of the pins. As we conducted our own study, we found this to be mostly true. But there are certain things that are not so simplistic.
(https://www.wired.com/2016/04/pinterest-reinvents-prove-really-worth-billions/)
OUR AUDIENCE
After doing some research we found that most Pinterest users are women under the age of 45. But there are a few male users and some older users here and there. As we created personas we wanted to make sure everyone was included and their experiences were thought about in context with gestures.
Susan, a 46 year-old woman was our primary persona. We figured that Rory and Blake, because of their age and tech proficiency, would not have as many problems navigating through the app and using all the gestures. To better understand Susan’s use of the app we created a Journey Map.
In the journey map we recorded all of the gestures she would use to navigate through the app as well as the emotions she was feeling along her journey. We figured that most of the gestures she would use were basics, she didn’t like to try new ways of finding things.
GESTURE CATALOG
We created a gesture catalog for all of the gestures that Pinterest has to offer. We gave a brief description of the gesture, if there are any differences between platforms (iOS and Android) and where it is commonly found in the app. Many of these are obvious, like scroll, tap, swipe. But Pinterest has some unique gestures that are only found in that app. We called these two the Tap&Hold and the Quick Menu Access.
PROBLEMS WE FOUND
The main issues we found were that people were not utilizing Pinterest’s gestures to their full potential. Almost all of our test users didn’t know that they could swipe back and forth between pins, as well as that they could do a long swipe to get back to the home screen. Most would open a pin then hit the back button to get back to their feed.
There were a few other pain points that were found, but most were not dealing with gestures, but more dealing with some slight inconsistencies, as well as confusion about what to do with pins and boards.
When asking our test users about their experience afterward, most said they had a good experience — nothing too frustrating — and an overall pleasant time.
After coming to the conclusion that our test users were not utilizing all of what Pinterest had to offer — but still having a good experience — we decided that these people were not being negatively affected by not knowing about Pinterest’s gestures. However, if they did know about them, their experience would be even better.
OUR SOLUTION
In order to tackle the problem of users not realizing that there are more gestures that they are not aware of, we decided that the best way to educate people was to take it from the beginning. We created a new onboarding system that explained some of the gestures that were missing from the current onboarding — the gestures that most older people were missing out on.
After going through the on-boarding system a couple of times, we decided the best way to go about this prototype would be to create a video of the on-boarding and add in our own gesture instructions that matched the same style that Pinterest already had going.
To do this, we took a screen recording of Pinterest’s current on-boarding, leaving time to insert animations that explained and demonstrated the gestures that we found people were unaware of, such as swiping back and forth between open pins, and a long swipe back to return to their home feed.
We took the recording into Hype 3 and created animations that mimicked theirs, but placed them in the time slots we had made so that it looked like it was just part of the regular on-boarding.
Once the video was complete, it was exported as a phone-sized video (it would fit the screen size of an iPhone 6 Plus to make it seem like it was just an actual prototype, not a video.)
Then we were able to test it on the same people we had taken observations of, to see if these additions to the on-boarding improved their understanding of the gestures Pinterest had.
OUR RESULTS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
From testing and observation, we came to the conclusion that gestures should be explained and understood before habits are formed. The people we tested our on-boarding on understood that there were gestures they were missing out on, but because they had already formed the habit of pressing the back button instead of swiping, they might not use it as much as they should.
We have concluded that Pinterest is missing some vital gestures and explanations in their current on-boarding. They don’t explain some of the key features of the Pinterest app, like swiping between different pins, a long swipe to get back to the home feed, and the tap-and-hold feature that brings up the quick-access menu. The quick-access menu is a key feature of the app that is never mentioned in the on-boarding, and something we were not aware that so many people were not using or aware of until we did our secondary testing.
All in all, we believe Pinterest has based their mobile experience around the website, and as a result, is just showing people the basic tap gestures that are similar to clicking on a desktop. They are completely missing out on showing people how the mobile app can have a totally different experience than the desktop, as well as that there are different gestures available on the app. It seems like the app onboarding was an after-thought and they just based it off of what they already had for the desktop, even though the app is a completely different experience.
The people who are unaware of these gestures are not negatively affected by not knowing about them, but their experience could be so much better if they DID know about them. So our main suggestion for Pinterest is to create a more fleshed out on-boarding system to explain the differences in the mobile app that show all of the gestures available to them — especially ones that make the mobile app different from the web. This includes the quick-access menu and horizontal navigation. This would all help people to form habits of using them when they first start their Pinterest journey.
To fix the problem of retroactively teaching people about the new gestures, we suggest that they use their tracking and analytics to see how people are using and interacting with the app. If they have never used the quick-access menu, or if they haven’t swiped between pins in a long time, Pinterest’s algorithm could bring up some instructions on how to use them to show users or give them a reminder.
