Product Design Consultant
September 2023 - December 2023
UI, Human-Centric Design, UX Research
Sarah Suen (PM), Uyen Phan, Michid Bayambajav, Joanna Ye, Angie Nguyen, and me!
1/ ORGANIZED PIN SELECT
With the current design, if a business has many pins, it can be a hassle finding the one they want to promote. To better organize this, we separated two views of pins into recents and boards. This allows users to easily find the pin and help them save time.
2/ TARGETING OPTIONS
The current interests selections are already comprehensive, however, they are difficult to navigate and visualize selected options. To help users save some time, we included pop-up tags, automatic dropdown, and visible scroll barfor the selected interests box.
3/ UI IMPROVEMENTS
Many users thought the UI was too “white and plain” and certain elements could stand out. We enhanced the card format so active section is dynamically highlighted. We also changed the “Promote” button to red to help it stand out. We included a pop-up confirmation once the pin is promoted with links to resources helping new users.
New SMBs struggle with investing enough time to grow on social media
Setting the right budget and allocating enough funds to grow is essential
Targeting the right audience is important for SMBs to stand out
This presents a great opportunity for Pinterest to address these issues, especially for first-time users, to improve their simplified ad-creation flow and ease this overwhelming process for busy SMBs.
We needed to learn from SMB's themselves, through a survey, contextual inquiries, and user interviews. We built on top of the secondary research to ask the right questions.
USER SURVEYS
GUIDANCE & EXPERIENCE
Users have limited knowledge using Pinterest and seek a guided experience.
TARGETING OPTIONS
Having specific and personalized targeting allow SMBs to maximize their limited resources.
CONFUSING USER FLOW
New users have difficulties navigating to the “Promote pin” feature and confuse it with “Create campaign.” **
**
Through affinity diagrams, we clustered our research into 3 main pain points.
1.
SMBs value specific targeting options to maximize their advertising efforts.
2.
SMBs struggle with limited experience with marketing.
3.
Lack of highlighted features lead to a confusing user flow.
From our user survey, we learned that 50% of participants favoured Instagram as their top ad platform, followed by 25% on Google and 25% on Facebook. We put ourselves in the shoes of SMBs and created an ad on these platforms, as well as Tiktok. We scored and ranked these competitors in 6 areas.
AD CREATION PROCESS
Instagram is most intuitive to use, even without prior ad creating knowledge.
KEY FEATURES
Facebook and Google Ads offers advanced features such as “Bid Strategy” and “Pixel Tracking.”
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Tiktok is the only social media platform from our list that offers 1:1 consulting with an marketing specialist to personalize ads.
USABILITY
Pinterest and Instagram have the most user-friendly process by simplifying the process into a step-by-step process.
DEMOGRAPHICS
Facebook targets the largest demographic with very specific targeting options.
PRICING
All platforms are subject to personal budgets for each ad.
Platforms like Facebook and Google cater towards experienced marketers, focusing on optimizing ad to goal conversion through a detailed, time-consuming process.
Pinterest focuses on being approachable to new marketers by prioritizing efficiency and ease of use, condensing the creation space to one page and three easy steps.
Here is the journey of both an experienced marketer and a newbie using Pinterest.
STEP 1: SELECT A PIN
CURRENTLY
The existing side pop-up is unorganized because it displays all uploaded pins, making it difficult to find the pin to promote.
REDESIGN
Organized views of uploaded pins by recents and boards.
Simplified navigation with pin selection
Organizing by recent pins and pins in boards eliminates endless scrolling.
STEP 2: TARGETING DETAILS
CURRENTLY
The existing interests list is extensive and contains many nested and hidden items that are automatically selected when the parent item is selected.
REDESIGN
The dropdown opens automatically to avoid hidden options, and selected interests are displayed as tags at the top for better visibility.
Specific targeting options
Selected targeting interests helps the users be more intentional with their target audience.
STEP 3: SUBMIT & PROMOTE YOUR PIN
CURRENTLY
No confirmation page, leaving users confused about any next steps or actions.
REDESIGN
A confirmation page that provides additional resources and guidance on next steps.
Convenient place to promote another pin as well.
Refined UI & Confirmation
Friendlier UI makes the ad-creation process more approachable for SMBs, and the confirmation reassures them with next steps!
I was definitely intimidated to tackle this semester-long project, but it was an amazing experience working with real clients. Working with Pinterest taught me how to effectively leverage contextual inquiries to understand user flows and drive research-backed insights further into the creation phase.
I'd like to extend a huge thank you to Judy and Wei from Pinterest for guiding and supporting our team all semester, as well as to the rest of my team for pulling through this exciting journey!
Get in touch :)
