Seriously supportive

Adapting Pinterest’s tone for our new emotional well-being resources

Writing Pinterest’s emotional well-being flow, which directs people who search for terms like “sadness” and “anxiety quotes” into stress-relieving exercises, led me to totally shift my writing’s tone…as well as get in touch with a side of myself that I sometimes close off. Once someone who idly picked at my toenails during yoga videos and punned recklessly in Pinterest’s products, I’ve now journaled for self-compassion, envisioned my worries as a neon billboard, and released tension in different parts of my body to develop our 20 brand-new mental health flows.

Pinterest’s mission is bringing people the inspiration to create a life they love, and many of the use cases we’re best known for are about just that — lasagna recipes, home decor, basset hound pictures. As our platform’s grown, we’ve found that people also use Pinterest for coping with sadness or anxiety. So this year, we developed a new compassion feature to provide step-by-step relief and help to people searching for these topics. We released the feature in two batches: First, the initial 12 exercises to help coping with sadness and anxiety, and more recently, a set of exercises to provide support during urges to self-harm.

Pinterest partnered the founders of Brainstorm, Stanford’s Lab for Mental Health Innovation, for this project. Brainstorm’s psychiatrists picked elements for our new feature from their repertoire of evidence-based therapies that they traditionally use 1:1 with patients. Once they handed off interventions that could be generalized for the public in a tech-friendly way, it was my job to fine tune the language and practices for our product and brand voice. Finally, we continued to collaborate with Brainstorm, as well as get additional advice from Vibrant Emotional Health and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, throughout the process. That way we could ensure developing (and finished!) drafts met professional standards, while still resonating with the overall Pinterest experience.

Yeah. Despite an angsty adolescence filled with plenty of therapy, honing the words and writing structure for emotional support resources (and impressing a team of mental health experts to boot) was a daunting task that ultimately ended up like…this!

So let’s see how it got there.

How the words got made

I first set up guiding principles for how to generally position and phrase the exercises:

1. Keep it general. We didn’t want to assume anything about people using these exercises, so the writing had to resonate with as many people as possible. While it might work to say “imagine the person who wronged you and write them a letter expressing forgiveness” to someone you know, we couldn’t give this advice to an unknown person on Pinterest. We don’t know their background or what they’re going through. A better way of phrasing this would be: “Visualize that person and the situation. How did you feel during your conflict?” It puts the focus on the reader’s feelings, rather than external factors.

2. Structure the messaging. Getting mental health help from a professional is often a loose and unstructured conversation. Pinterest’s exercises, scripted ahead of time, couldn’t be interactive or adapted to real-time feedback. So to write a clear, engaging scripted narrative for our new compassion surface, we used Brainstorm’s advice of using a structure of education, guided exercises, then key takeaways. In-product, this translated to:

• The first screen contextualizes what people would get out of the activity.
• Then, every screen gets a discrete “step.”
• Every activity ended with a reflection to take away — both to provide closure and to hope that this tool could be something that could help people get off Pinterest and practice these values in their day-to-day life.

3. “Do no harm.” All rounds and revisions, from first draft to final voicing polish, were approved by the mental health experts at Brainstorm to meet their social media safety framework, where the tenets of the Hippocratic Oath (if you’re not into medical TV drama lingo, that’s “do no harm”) are applied to tech product creation.

So here’s a look at how the exercises evolved, from the initial scripts to the final product:

Polishing the voice and tone

Pinterest’s conversational tone tends to run on a spectrum: Sometimes it’s super-playful, and uses puns and exclamation points and joyful words. Sometimes it’s bold and aspirational, and uses inspiring phrases and images of Pinners. And sometimes…we say things as plainly as possible to get out of the way and keep the focus on the people using it.

Our emotional well-being flow is on the conversational/straightforward side of the spectrum. The paragraph format — rare for Pinterest! — also allowed me to make the copy supportive and warm through longer sentences that checked in, and line breaks that gave space. As a final tonal layer, I looked for this to sound like a conversation with a friend rather than aspirational and rooted in concepts like “wellness” or self-improvement. Some microcopy examples of this (you are reading a Medium post, after all, so I assume details like this are your jam):

And lastly: The art!

The final element that made our voice and tone come to life is the project’s visual design. Nothing in the emotional health flow’s UI looks like our typical home feed or Pin close up, so we relied on illustrations that would set a Pinterest-y tone.

Wonderful brand team designer (and human!) Belen Tenorio suggested we use abstract images to make these practices as universal as possible — a major tenant of my voicing principals for the project. A photograph next to an exercise title might label what one person’s compassion, relaxation, or stress relief might “look” like; optimistic, fluid and fun shapes in our brand colors would thematically evoke the practices. I asked Belen about how she established the project’s tone in her illustrations, and she filled me in:

1. Get inspired and stay goofy! Belen says that to feel creative it’s important to play, all the time. In her own words, “I hate when things are too serious, so I look for playful images or I start drawing things or make nonsense to warm me up.” (She also deadpanned “have you heard of this thing Pinterest.com?” You can check her board with inspiration for this project here!)
2. Create your worlds. Inspired by Brainstorm’s advice that nature scenes are calming, Belen used Illustrator to digitally draw outdoor worlds to shift mindsets from stressed to serene.
3. Tweak and hone. As the last step of her process, Belen used Sketch to move her work into the UI. She matched our current brand palette and simplified the illustrations to pair with the text. At this point, our uh-mazing product team designer Q Pinyokool gave the illustrations a final treatment for accessibility and continuity with our current design system; for our newer self-harm coping exercises; Q and designer Sara Strand continued to design color and background images with these same principles and palette.

So there you have it: A safe, general, and super-structured exercise. A warm, supportive but still pretty straightforward tone. Abstract and subtly wacky art. These are the things that informed the brand new Pinterest emotional health voice. And while crafting this may not have taught me a deep breathing habit — or, uhm, mindfulness, daily stretching, or a healthy relationship with anxieties surrounding my parents’ 2004 divorce — I sure developed new product writing tools from it.

I’ll take it!

Illustrations by Sara Strand, Belen Tenorio and Q Pinyokool