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Meeting Pinterest's new business strategy head on with content design: How I reworked the Analytics experience to accommodate Pinterest's new simplified content ecosystem
I built the content design strategy for updating the Analytics page to meet Pinterest's new direction. I reworked the page with the product designer, defined all the metrics including new ones, added tooltips (yes, we all hate them, but they were needed), and used content to clarify potentially confusing scenarios for the users.
Highlights
Highlights
Drove clarity among stakeholders on key metrics
Aligned content and business strategy
Created end-to-end user education and engagement
SCE (simplified content experience) was a company-wide effort to consolidate and simplify content format structure on Pinterest. Rather than the 21+ formats in use before, Pinterest would support only two types of pins: images and videos. This project allowed us to reunite our content ecosystem to drive long-term Pinner inspiration and Creator success while maintaining key business metrics.
Pin stats
Pin stats
Pre-SCE metrics varied across pin type and by media type: image Pins, video Pins, and Idea Pins all had different metric availability. This led to Creator distrust in the consistency and accuracy of our metric reporting. Post SCE, all new pins would be Unified Pins would share the same set of core metrics and a set of media-specific metrics. The plan was to eventually do away with the Idea Pins concept (Idea ads would still be available) and treat them as videos instead. This also meant that, while SCE unified Pins and metrics moving forward, we needed to reconcile this with legacy pins and their metrics.
So the things we needed to keep in mind and build toward:
Reconcile metric availability of legacy Pins and new Pins
All legacy Idea Pins will be treated as videos; however, not all of them have video metrics
Legacy Idea Pins will not have lifetime video metrics
Lifetime metric is not available for legacy standard Pins
With these factors in mind, I had to revisit quite a bit of the existing Pin stats page, both for web and mobile.
The reworked Pin stats page.
Since we were using a toggle model to show the two sets of metrics, I added tooltips to the toggles to increase visibility and also differentiate between the two sets of metrics.
Tooltip for Overall in toggle.
Tooltip for Video stats in toggle.
I took this as an opportunity to also reconcile the different definitions for the overall and video metrics. We had different definitions spread out across the different product surfaces and also the help center. I refined these definitions, kept them simple and clear, and also shared them with the rest of the content design and help center team so we could all get aligned.
Updated tooltip definitions for overall metrics.
Updated tooltip definitions for video metrics.
Sample overall metric definition in mobile.
Sample video metric definition in mobile.
The error messages and alerts for the video metrics were the most challenging part. Some of these metrics were net new and weren't measured before SCE. Idea Pins were now considered videos, but legacy Idea Pins wouldn't have video metrics already measured back in time.
I worked closely with engineers to identify the different scenarios in which the metrics, the graph or both wouldn't display correctly or be empty. We had some scenarios in which we couldn't tell the user why we weren't able to display these metrics or graph, but we still had to give just enough of a reason to inform the user.
A few of these possible scenarios included:
The user selected lifetime for date range. In this case, there could be dashes in the metrics, because lifetime metrics weren't available. However, there might be a graph to display up to the last 30 days.
On web, I was able to add some education to the metrics. I used an error message to only display 30 days of the graph. In either case, it's made clear that the user can only see this much data for the lifetime date range.
In the mobile version, the video metrics for the last 30 days were automatically shown for lifetime date range.
The Idea Pin was a single-image Idea Pin or just a standard image Pin and therefore had no video metrics.
Web alert for video metrics for single-image Idea Pin.
Mobile alert for video metrics for single-image Idea Pin.
The user selected a date range before SCE was rolled out. There would be no data measured during this time; both the metrics and the graph would be empty.
Web alert when a user selected a date range before the new metrics were measured.
Mobile alert when a user selected a date range before the metrics were measured.
The user selected a date range during which only partial data was available. There would be limited data in the metrics and only partial data in the graph.
Web alert when there was only partial data available.
Mobile alert for partial data.
Format filters
Format filters
On the Analytics surface, we needed to reconcile the format filter and split by options to support the SCE vision. Creators and advertisers would choose content type (organic/paid) first, and based on the content type selection, we would show different Pin/ads format filter options.
The education calling attention to this bifurcated filter (first we select organic or paid content and then the format) was simple enough! But the tooltip I got everyone to agree on was too chunky for my liking.
Tooltip to encourage the user to select a Pin type. Pin types were straightforward and not complicated.
Tooltip to select an ad type. Some ad types also included multiple formats, so I nested them for added clarity.
When we worked on the education for the bifurcated filter, there was also another update that wasn't technically SCE-related. All the filters that were cluttering the surface got moved into a sheet that the user could access through more filters. The bifurcated filter was rolled out first and then the more filters update, so it was more likely that a user would be educated about each of these things separately. If a user was seeing both these changes together for the first time, the bifurcated filter part would appear first and then the more filters part.
I got feedback from the PMM team and leadership that I shouldn't use Idea Pins in a way that implied that the concept still existed. But how do you tell the user that Idea Pins were just Pins now without using the term? I drove consensus among all the stakeholders on how to convey this in one succinct alert.
Tell me you don't have Idea Pins without telling me you don't have Idea Pins...
Aligning the Analytics experience with the SCE strategy was my very first project at Pinterest! I only joined well past roadmapping and halfway through the design phase. If I weren't working on tight deadlines, I would've taken the time to build stronger relationships with stakeholders and push back some more as I ramped up.
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