Last summer, Pinterest acquired a visual discovery site called Icebergs, and today that team is showing off what it’s been up to, having since relocated from Spain to San Francisco. While over the past several months, Pinterest’s focus has been on improving search and discovery on its site, the former Iceberg team members have been working to improve the process involved with saving pins themselves. Today, they’re rolling out a new “Pin It” button that’s designed to speed up the process of saving content to Pinterest by reducing the number of clicks by half.
Before, using the “Pin It” button on the web required four clicks before the content was saved, as you may recall.
“It was a bit hard,” notes former Icebergs co-founder, now Pinterest Product Manager César Isern López. “But on mobile it was only two taps away. We wanted to translate that mobile experience to the web and make it extremely fast and easy to save anything,” he says.
One of the improvements arriving now in the new button is that it makes it easier to find and create boards from the interface. The window will now display the three boards you’ve been pinning to most recently at the top of the flow, and it includes an improved Pin selector as users pin from around the web. The company has been testing the new button with a small percentage of its user base before today, and claims that early results have shown that the new flow have increased repins by 3 percent.
As you can see in the screenshot above, when the user clicks the new Pin It button on a webpage with a number of images, they’re shown a message that asks them to “Choose a Pin to Save,” then they click on the one they want to share. Afterward, the user is shown the new pop-up window where their top boards are shown to them first, and a search option helps them quickly locate other boards by name, if need be.
While some users have already seen this button in the wild, Pinterest says the rollout will reach 100 percent of its user base today.
Though somewhat of a minor tweak to Pinterest’s user interface, the change is one of several the company has planned, we understand. López and his former co-founder Albert Pereta, now a lead product designer at Pinterest, created a new “Save” team inside the company when they joined. That team is focused on making it easier to Pin content from around the web, including articles, ideas and inspiration, recipes, products and more.
They’ve also been responsible for building other bulk editing tools that have allowed users to copy, move or delete Pins from a board all at once. And going forward, they’ll be working to improve the process of returning to previously pinned items, they say. That is, making it easier to go back to your Pins, search for them, and then actually use them.
The company says that, to date, it has 50 billion Pins on its service which are saved onto more than 1 billion boards, and it’s now serving up over 1.5 trillion recommendations annually. Already, its users are saving a lot of content onto the site daily, including 2 million product Pins and over 14 million articles, for example. With this small change to the pinning flow, however, the company is hoping to increase those numbers even more.
