Co-creating hair pattern search
Inviting users into the process
Your hair. It’s about as personal as it gets. Everyone’s hair is unique, and on Pinterest, we celebrate that. We know people love to discover and imagine new ways to style and care for their hair, but helping everyone to do that hasn’t always been as easy as it should be. So we set out to build a whole new way of searching by hair pattern on Pinterest.
From the onset of this project, we knew that it was crucial to center the perspectives of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian communities in the product design process if we were going to truly address some of the challenges around finding inspiration for hair-related ideas. We needed to invite people within these communities to participate in the different stages of our product development process in order to create an on-going dialogue around these challenges and the ways we could address them.
Here’s how we approached this:
- We partnered with subject matter experts at every step of the process.
- We conducted foundational research with a cohort of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian participants to learn about their experiences around finding hair inspiration in their lives.
- We explored initial design possibilities using co-creation activities with these participants and iteratively developed the experience, receiving feedback from participants at multiple points throughout the development process.
Inviting people in
We built hair pattern search on Pinterest using a participatory approach, where we invited people who had the lived experience of looking for online beauty content that doesn’t align with Western and European standards of beauty into our process as partners throughout. We designed a multi-part, multi-month research study with a cohort of Pinterest users with a diverse range of hair. We recruited participants who identified as Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and we considered intersectionality in this. They engaged with our team regularly as we went through the process of exploring opportunities, ideating solutions, and building and evaluating experiences aimed at solving real problems. This cohort guided the initial direction for how we could make online hair experiences more inclusive and then provided ongoing input on the evolving design and implementation of a product experience in this space. The idea here was to have a consistent group of people to come along the journey with us in building this experience.
Early in the research process, we connected with thought leaders at the intersection of race, technology, and beauty who were outside our company to inform our research and collected their feedback and input on our research approach. They informed the questions and topics we explored and provided guidance on how we would approach each topic with participants.
With the research, we started broad, with an exploratory study aimed at understanding and building empathy with the experiences that people of color have with beauty broadly and, more specifically, hair care and styling. Participants completed digital diary entries where they showcased their beauty routines and captured their day-to-day experiences and challenges looking for beauty inspiration online.
We followed the diary study with interviews. These interviews were not led by Pinterest researchers, instead they were led by the thought leaders we partnered with earlier in the development cycle. The researchers from our team took a step back so that these experts could lead. Most were not trained researchers and yet they were more effective than we could have been at leading these conversations because they had shared lived experiences with participants in our research.
This phase helped us to narrow in on an opportunity space, which we then explored in depth with the cohort through co-design, where we partnered with them to envision different possibilities to make finding relevant hair content easier.
Designing and building together
Product designers often navigate quantitative data and anecdotal insights to build products, using our intuition as a guiding force to address real user problems. However, this particular project required us to reexamine our design processes. It challenged us to relinquish control in the design process and act as a tool to translate the ideas of people with lived experience into product designs. To do this, we conducted a co-creation activity with the cohort of research participants who had been involved in earlier stages of research.
For this activity, we crafted a library of design components to be mixed, matched, and manipulated on the fly in a live video conversation, in order to have a socially distant session and to reach people from all over the country. We showed a range from buttons, to search bars, to a limited set of icons and miscellaneous illustrations of hair strands and stock photography of various models with a range of hair patterns. Research participants dictated their ideal experience while our product designer moved around and crafted additional elements on the fly. They were able to watch their ideas come to life right before their eyes. Anyone can be a designer. Not everyone is used to pushing pixels, and we’ve realized that shouldn’t stop them. They are the experts in their own lives after all, and simply need the tools to turn their ideas into reality.
We’d ask questions like “Does this capture what you were thinking?”, “Does this reflect the ideas that you’ve shared?” in order to gauge where we were getting it right, and where we needed to revisit. We saw participants follow their ideas in various directions, building off of the ideas from the other participants in the session and celebrating each other’s ideas. You could feel the excitement in the room as people felt their problems being addressed and their ideas becoming fully realized.
After multiple co-creation sessions with different participants, we compared the various designs and identified a few themes. We then went through multiple rounds of iterative design in a singular direction, which incorporated elements from all the co-creation sessions. At each step of the process, we brought the evolving product and designs back to the cohort to get their feedback in order to ensure that we understood their input and appropriately reflected it in the iteration.
Delivering language for everyone
We found that this project highlighted UX challenges specifically around language and comprehension, so we worked closely with subject matter experts to ensure everything from the name of the tool itself to category descriptions were relevant, inclusive, and accurate.
We realized that with any new feature, let alone one that is groundbreaking for the industry as hair pattern search on Pinterest is, comprehension and awareness would pose a particular challenge and was one that we wanted to get ahead of. We needed to find the balance between how much context someone might need to understand what the hair pattern search can and can’t do. And because the tool recognizes only visual patterns in an image, we had to find the right words to explain that we weren’t diagnosing hair type or curl pattern. We don’t all talk about our hair in the exact same way, so we worked to land on language that could be expressive and accessible for a broad audience. As an example, our subject matter experts suggested we add the “Protective” category to ensure that we captured the vast and beautiful hair that may be styled in a protective way.
Knowing this, we made decisions as a committee around the subject matter, and then tailored these decisions by applying Pinterest’s brand of voice and tone. Through this process, we landed on a set of 6 hair patterns; Protective, Coily, Curly, Wavy, Straight, and Bald / Shaved which you can apply to search queries such as “Summer Hairstyles” and “Hair Color Ideas” to find inspiration tailored to you. We also made sure that user education was accessible from the moment we introduced the feature and carried throughout the in product experience in order to help everyone identify their own unique hair pattern as well as how it translates to discovering relevant Hair and Beauty content on Pinterest. One aspect of education that was really important to us was ensuring that people who have not been exposed to the vast world of hair were able to understand hair unlike their own through in-product education. In discussions with experts, we learned it was critical to give this discussion space, rather than simply adding a search tool in the product with no educational information.
Iterate, iterate, improve
One of our takeaways from this project is that participation matters. This is how you build an inclusive product. People value being listened to and truly heard. Because we reflected our learnings back to participants and updated them on our progress, they could see what was coming from their input. They could see firsthand how we listened to them over the course of the research and design process.
Throughout the study, several participants shared with us how they appreciated the opportunity to have a voice in building an experience they would directly benefit from. By including them throughout the process, and by showcasing how their input translated into product evolutions, participants felt a sense of ownership in the product. One participant conveyed this sentiment after the launch of the feature by telling us how she felt like a “proud mama” that something she contributed to was released into the world. We’re proud of the work, too. Try it out! Find your next hairstyle on Pinterest.
Jordan DiSanto, Product Designer; Chris Schaefbauer, Research Manager; Corey Janssen, Content Designer
To learn more about design and research at Pinterest, check out the rest of Pinterest Design and follow us on Twitter. To view and apply to open opportunities, visit our Careers page.
