Pinterest is a popular website that allows users to "pin" or save images, recipes, and other content to personalized boards by category. It has over 28% of adult internet users in the US as members. The site follows principles of good design like direct manipulation and consistency. While easy to use overall, it could improve by making it simpler to reassign pins to different boards and adding alphabetical sorting of boards.

1. Critiques of a Good User Interface: Pinterest.com
Sara Cassella
Abstract. Pinterest.com follows the Eight Golden Rules of design and the 10
heuristics for design well. The site is easy to navigate, and draws a range of
consumers, though most are women. The site is gaining popularity with an
increase in 7% of internet users over the past year.
1 Introduction
Pinterest.com is a free, but by invitation only, website designed for any user above
the age of thirteen. The website has a user create a profile, and within their profile
they create “Boards”. These boards are folders in a sense, or categories in which
“Pins”, or tagged items can be stored. The user then browses either the website itself,
or the rest of the World Wide Web to find items to pin. These items can range
anywhere from a recipe the user wants to save for later, to a sample resume or tips for
performing well in an interview. The user picks which board they want to pin an item
to, and then when they want to go back and look at something they have saved, they
can view their boards to see the pinned links in each category.
Users can also use Pinterest to follow friends, celebrities, style magazines, and
many more. This feature allows the user to access a feed on their home page that
shows all the items being pinned by people they have chosen to follow, as well as
items that Pinterest has picked as being interesting to each particular user. For
Example, on my homepage there are pins posted by friends I follow, as well as
Pinterest picks for me.

2. 2. User Population
The user population of Pinterest.com is 28% of adult internet users and 22% of the
entire adult population. Women are the primary users, with 42% of women online
using Pinterest and 13% of men online. Their draw is still typically among younger
users, with only a small portion over the age of 50. Demographically, there are
typically low and high income with at least some college experience visiting the site
regularly.

3. 3. Principles of Good Design
This website implements good design for many reasons. First of all, it is easy to
navigate throughout the site to find the item you are looking for. Pinterest uses tags to
specify an item, so for example if I was looking to find a warm white bean chili that is
low in calories I would go up to the search bar and type in “White Bean Chili” and
use the tags provided to narrow my search.
Once I have entered this search, I can use provided tags to narrow my search to meet
my criteria further.
After the search button is clicked, the key words entered are displayed as tags, so if I
decided all of a sudden I wanted to look at more than just White Bean Chili recipes, I
would click the ‘X’ to close out of “White” and “Bean” in the search bar to broaden
my search. If I decided I wanted to make my Chili Vegetarian as well as white bean, I
would click on the suggested Vegetarian tag to narrow my results. The Search bar
also allows users to search for friends by name to view their profile and boards.
Pinterest.com uses Direct Manipulation as the interaction style for the user. This is
very effective because it is very easy for the user to see how to pin something to a
board and where their link is going to be stored after it is pinned. In order to add an
item from the site itself the user hovers over the image of the item they would like to
save and the “Pin It” button appears. The user then clicks the button to show a list of
their available boards comes up, along with the opportunity to create a new board if
they are viewing an item that doesn’t seem to fall into any of their current categories.

4. Once the item has been added to a board, a pop up window appears telling the user
that they have successfully pinned this item.
Pinterest also keeps track of what you have stored in each board that you have
created. For example, if two weeks from now I decided to come back and search for
white bean chili again because the recipe I made last time wasn’t quite what I wanted,
Pinterest shows an error message to keep you from saving the same item again. This
way, since the feed I am viewing does not show what I have already saved, once I try
to save an item again Pinterest will let me know with the “pssst, looks like you have
already saved this pin” at the top of my screen.

5. By having all of these features, Pinterest complies with the Golden Principles of
Design by providing informative feedback, preventing errors, creating an effective
interaction style, and providing consistency throughout the site.
4. Heuristic Evaluation
Pinterest.com complies with almost all of the 10 heuristic guidelines for evaluation.
1. The visibility of the system is clear, the large images draw the user to the
subject of each pin, and they remain interested by the quality of the visuals
associated with each item.
2. The system matches the real world because of the ability to file away items
into categories. Much like a file cabinet with tabs, the user can take an items
and move it to a locations where it is more easily accessed by the way the
user would categorize it instead of how the internet categorizes it. Because the
user can customize the names of each tab, the site is as personal as a users
own file cabinet.
3. There is great user control and freedom because the user is able to pin from
anywhere on the web. Google Chrome software has an add-on for pinterest
that lets you directly pin websites and items from anywhere while browsing,
without even having Pinterest open on a browser.
4. Pinterest is consistent throughout each page and throughout the internet with
the same mechanism to pin items, and the same layout no matter what
platform you are pinning from.
5. It is easy to recognize when something is pinnable because by hovering over
any image the pin button will show up, no matter which site you are on. Also
on almost all news sites there is the option to pin an article at the bottom of
each page.
5. Improvements to the Site
While Pinterest has an exceptional User Interface, there are still some adjustments
that could be made to the site. For example, if a user has accidentally pinned an item
to the wrong board, it is a long process to change which board is on. The user must re-
pin the item to the correct board, which means either searching for it again on the site
or online, or go to the board it was accidentally pinned on to, re-pinning it, and then
deleting it from the wrong board.
Another improvement to the site would be to change the sort feature of the boards.
When trying to pin an item, the three most relevant boards appear at the top, but after
that the boards are sorted by relevancy instead of alphabetically or in a natural order.
Because of this, if a user has a large number of boards it is difficult to find a board
that does not show up as immediately relevant unless the user can remember the exact
name of the board to search for it.

6. 6. References
Pinterest.com. Pinterest, Web.
"Social Media Update 2015." Pewinternet.com. Pewinternet, 8 Jan. 2015.
Web. 15 Feb. 2016.