Background: Pinterest is an image-sharing and social media service designed to save and discover lifestyle inspiration for beauty, fashion, home decor, travel, food, and more. Recently Pinterest wants to increase the users' purchases on the site. They find that a lot of users lost because they couldn't make money on the website.
01
Pinterest's competitors, such as Instagram, have twice as much monthly user activity as Pinterest.
02
Pinterest has fewer younger users than other social media.
03
The Pinterest website lost some users because they can not make money on the platform.
The goal of the project is to improve the user experience with the Pinterest website and understand their attitudes toward purchasing on the social media platforms.
Compare the content, features, and purchase of the pinterest platform with other social media platforms to understand Pinterest's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Total 25 participants:
68%: 25-34 years old
20%: 18-24 years old
12%: 35-44 years old
Conducted four interviews to understand the user’s motivation and attitude about the Pinterest website.
Pinterest is an imagesharingandsocial media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information to get inspiration. The main categories include fashion, home, travel, food & drink, and craft.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service. Users can browse other users' content by tag and location, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed.
Tastemade is a global, digital food and travel network for millennials that lets users explore cuisine from around the world through a mix of original content and user-submittedvideos.
Most of the users did not achieve their goals on the Pinterest website.
“I used to search on the Pinterest website to get inspiration, but I did not get much help. When I look for website design typography, the content is not rich enough. For example, when I click the picture that I am interested in, there is the same content. Even though I click the link related to the image, it also does not show much content about website design.” – P1
“I've been using this site more recently because I'm taking a class on design. I found inspiration for web design on this site. There are many resources on this website, and the popularity is also very high, and the designers know this website. I think the quality of the content on this site is pretty high.” – P2
“I have used the Pinterest website before looking for photography, and now I hardly ever use the website. The reason is that the website recommended content is not professional and detailed enough.” – P3
“I used the website a long time ago, but I haven't used it recently. I used it for decorating inspiration, I googled the keyword and came up Pinterest, and I briefly browsed. I don't know what this site is mainly used for.” – P4
Most respondents had less shopping experience on social media because they did not trust social media advertising.
“I don't have any experience buying products on social media because I need to make sure the products have high quality, and the payment is secure. But I prefer to go to the specialty online shopping websites because I trust those websites.”
“I bought it once. I shopped on this site because it just happened to give me a coupon for an item I needed. The price of this product is very cost-effective, even cheaper than Taobao. But without this coupon, I would prefer to buy on Taobao, because I can see more products, know their sales, user reviews, and reliable after-sales service. I prefer to do professional things to use professional software.”
“Bought the clothes it recommends and camera accessories on Instagrams. I am quite satisfied with these products because it is recommended some official brands’ websites and I am interested. It's funny that these sites I didn't know about before, but through Instagrams gave me more options for brands”
“I don't trust this ad unless it's a brand I know well, but I'd go to the brand's website to buy it instead of Instagram.”
Pinterest feature interview
“I hope this website can create a filter bar, but now this website only has a search bar. This website does not have a back button, I think a navigation bar could help with that. Also, I missed the information that I searched before, so I need to always to go the search bar to find it.”
“I clicked into this site and there is a lot of content, but I don't know where to start. For example, I want to find pictures related to decoration, I can get a lot of content on this website, but if there has a search bar or a recommendation bar would help me navigate this site. Too much content and clutter on this homepage. Categorizing content will make it clearer.”
