llaxsll

Hi mynameishere,

I'm the developer on the Growth Team @ Pinterest that built the experience in question.

First, thanks for the candid feedback. We always strive to understand users and better their experience (in this instance from the very first second they come in touch with Pinterest).

The overhaul of the unauth home page, which is internally dubbed "inspired wall", is a concept that we introduced and refined over a period of a few months. As the name suggests the idea behind it is to instantly connect with you on the level of a story(or a use case) of Pinterest that can inspire you and stick with you as you go through the signup and orientation process. It is a hint of what Pinterest could be for you not written in words but rather expressed through a visual composition. The further you get into the product the more we tailor the experience around things that you love and the story that they tell about you.

We actually did quite extensive testing around this experience because it is such an essential and sensitive part of the product. This included concept research (where we tried to identify what got people to use Pinterest), A/B testing (where we quantitatively showed that results were better than the previous home page), and user testing (where we qualitatively showed that people get better understanding and satisfaction with the product). One of the key findings was that people were able to instantly grasp how Pinterest is different from other popular services such as Instagram or Flickr. To put in music channel terms - it did a good job at explaining how MTV is different than VH1.

Obviously the work is not done and things can be improved. The inspired wall is still a relatively fresh concept and we continue iterating over it.

We plan on releasing an engineering blog post soon that will detail the process of rebuilding our unauth home page and the several iterations that it went through to be successful. Stay tuned and again thanks for the feedback.

Ludo

Ha! I attempted this yesterday, after I saw the article in TC. It was a really fun challenge! Good job guys! Hope I didn't cost you a lot of money.. by my estimates i sent you something close to like a million requests .. give or take.

got it. We'll definitely consider it in our next rev! I'll let you know.

Hi monkeygus! Thanks for the comment!

Yes, that has floated around as an idea. Totally not out of the realm of possibilities! We think that eating out is such a big problem for people with dietary needs, that it often affects their social life very negatively in many ways. This is the big challenge we are after.

But we are definitely on the lookout of our users telling us what they want to see in Eatfindr and following their needs. We've been live for a couple of weeks now, so our selection database is still growing, but we have over 15,000 gluten-free restaurants from across the US, as well as over 1,000 humane & organic restaurants.

ok, page is like-able now. Thanks frankdenbow for suggesting this fairly obvious miss on our part :)

we're on it .. and not stopping there .. you'll even be able to pin-it :P, if you so desire .. in a few hours, that is.

I have a low-key server at home. Ubuntu + dyndns. I even host some of my low-key sites on it. I've found it is a pretty good combo. It has come to be a very useful tool over the months.

I concur. I've lately switched away from GWT/GAE to something more like rails/jquery hybrid.

GWT does have some nice things to it, but I think in the grand scheme of things, the best part of it is the separation between server/client, and the forcing function of having to do rendering on the client, where it should be done in the first place.

With jquery, tho, you can achieve a very similar effect .. just have a div with an id and convert it to widget in one line. There are far more , and much more well written widgets on jquery, than on gwt. It is a little more work, but I think it is well worth it.