After launching its closed beta version in March 2010, Pinterest has rapidly emerged as the leader of digital photo-sharing. The redesign, announced in January, made its debut March 18 and has since been praised and criticized. While a ton of changes were made to the site’s backend, the chief goal of the redesign is clearly to give users what they want: more ways to find new content that is relevant to them. As a digital advertising agency, we saw it fit to give Pinterest lovers the lowdown:
Theme Categories
Categories: Before the redesign, the drop-down menu, given the header, “Everything,” was located in the center of the home page view when logged in.
Post-update, the category menu has moved to the top left corner to the left of the search bar.
New Pinterest
Website button: When pins are opened, a Website button appears at the top allowing users to go directly to the pin’s website, usually (but not always) the original source.
Purely Visual
Similar to Facebook’s recent update, arguably the most obvious change brought by the redesign was the larger-sized pins which increased in width from 600 pixels to 735 pixels.
Because the size of an individual pin increased, there are slightly fewer pins at first glance which, visually, is less overwhelming.
Removed: White spacing between pins on pinboard.
Navigation & Discovery
Added: Beneath a pin’s image and accompanying caption/description are mentions of the user who originally uploaded the pin, who repinned the pin, and/or the name of the board it was pinned onto.
Added: To the immediate right of an “opened” pin is a condensed overview of other pins from the same board of the opened pin – all without leaving the page. For example, if a user comes across a particularly funny pin, they can see the board it belongs to decide to visit it for more similar humor.
User Interaction
RE: Commenting: To leave a comment on a pin, users now must “open” the pin first (done by clicking on the pin’s image) and scrolling the bottom.
Removed: Liking boards from Facebook. Therefore, users cannot get more Likes simply by syncing their Pinterest and Facebook accounts.
Also note:
What are YOUR thoughts on Pinterest’s update? Leave a comment below:
