No one on the internet will shut up about Pinterest. So I signed up to see what all the fuss was about. Right now, I have a few user experience suggestions.
First of all, Pinterest, why the heck are you so insistent about requiring me to sign up through Facebook, especially if you immediately ask me to create a separate Pinterest user name and password? I’d really rather not have things linked to Facebook by default. The only benefit of Facebook sign-in, in fact, is that I don’t have to create yet another user name and password. But apparently not here. You just really super extra want to scrape my Facebook friends list to auto-populate my Pinterest friends list? Is that it?
And, okay Pinterest, I understand suggesting people to follow based on my interests. But did you really have to automatically sign me up to follow ALL of the pinboards from each of those people? Because not everything they post is actually related to the interests we have in common. When I put “design” as an interest, that means I’m interested in following pinboards with actual design stuff. It doesn’t mean I’m interested in following a Stupid Lolcats pinboard just because it was created by someone who also has design pinboards.
If you’re going to take my listed interests and automatically have me follow stuff tagged with those interests, please apply those interest tags to pinboards, not users.
Yes, on other social networks, you follow a given user, i.e. you get a feed of all of the stuff they post. When I follow @BadAstronomer on Twitter, I can’t choose to see just his posts about astronomy — I also see his posts about politics and religion. Now, I’m okay with that in the case of @BadAstronomer. But I have unfollowed people on Twitter because while they occasionally tweeted about stuff I was interested in, they also tweeted a lot about stuff I’m not into. It was a signal-to-noise problem. When there was too much noise, I had no choice but to unfollow the whole user — there was no way to filter.
Pinterest has a built-in filter, by letting you have different pinboards for each topic and letting people only follow specific pinboards. So why on earth not use that filter by default?
Also, is there any way to manage my friends list and which boards of theirs I’m following? Because right now I’m doing it by finding a post I’m not interested in, clicking on the poster’s name, and then clicking “unfollow all” and then “follow” on whatever specific pinboards of theirs I actually care to follow. Tedious.
And since I was started off following a bunch of people and boards I may or may not actually be interested in, I have to do a lot of this.
Right now, my feed is about 90% stuff I’m not interested in. And I am bored and annoyed with wading through it to set up filters to catch the cool stuff.
Overall, probably not the “Oh wow cool!” addictive first experience Pinterest was going for.