Why Pinterest-style layouts are worthless to everyone except Pinterest | Hacker News Reader

Why Pinterest-style layouts are worthless to everyone except Pinterest

stephencorwin.com

78 pointscorwinstephen37 comments

I have written about this before[0][1]. It has to do with the perceived browsing habits of one's users.

Let's posit that there are two ways of information search/seeking: the directed searcher, and the explorer. The direct searcher knows what he/she wants, either a narrow search or in broad swatches. Then there is another behaviour which is the explorer. When users are in this mode, their minds explore what is possible and their eyes roam to what attracts them.

Understanding these two behaviours, interaction design becomes quite a simple problem to solve. In the former, the interaction design is to get the user/reader to the target object as fast as possible. In the latter behaviour, the interaction design is to get users to stick around your system for as long as possible.

The best interaction design I have seen and experienced for the former behaviour is Google. The whole design of Google is to get people off their page as soon as possible.

Ironically, the best interaction design I have seen for the latter behaviour has the most minimal of UI design. I'm talking of course, about StumbleUpon.

Unfortunately it is very difficult to monetize SU's interaction design (SU ultimately found a method to monetize its assets which I found rather interesting). The Pinterest UI is merely a logical conclusion of designing interaction for lingering souls and wandering minds.

Imagine how easy it would be to have a 300x250 image ad in one of the boxes. Of course, the surprising thing is that Pinterest does not actively use display advertising to monetize.

[0] http://theforkingchef.com/post/41947940039/search-behaviour-...

[1] http://theforkingchef.com/post/42355830855/the-subscriber-an...

I am currently doing my bachelor thesis, and a part of my theoretical framework addresses these two kinds of shoppers. There is actually quite some academic research on the subject.

According to Swanson (1992) gratification can be categorized in two dimensions: process and content. Process gratification refers to the enjoyment and satisfaction from engaging in communication, content gratification refers to learning information from media content. In other words, motivations such as entertainment, relaxation, escape or just passing time are related to process gratifications (Parker and Plank, 2000). On the other hand information, cognitive and search motives are linked to content gratifications (Stafford and Stafford, 2001; Charney and Greenberg, 2002).

Other studies related to consumer behavior have identified two types of behavior as well. Much like content gratification, utilitarian motives are related to problem solving, goal oriented, task related and rational (Batra and Ahtola, 1991; Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 2001). Contrasting hedonic motives can be compared to process gratification. Hedonic motives are often driven by such things as fun, amusement, enjoyment, arousal, novelty and surprise (Hirschman, 1980; Babin et al. 1994; Hausman, 2000).

Simply put, utilitarian shoppers are those with a purchasing goal, while hedonic shoppers fulfill their needs not simply through the purchase, but in the shopping experience itself (Arnold and Reynolds, 2003). Hedonic shoppers are shopping for shopping sake.

Digging into research on the effect of web aesthetics on buying decisions of consumers, a case can be made for two aspects of aesthetics: aesthetic appeal and aesthetic formality. Aesthetic appeal refers to the attractiveness and creativity of design, while aesthetic formality covers the way information is presented, the clearness and legibility of a website (Schenkman and Jonsson, 2000; Lavie and Tractinsky, 2004).

Now combining these two types of consumers and two aspects of aesthetics, we can argue that the utilitarian shopper is highly motivated by aesthetic formality. He will be more likely to make a purchase when he is not distracted by novel design, and is able to find all the information he needs easily. Hedonic shoppers o the other hand are motivated by aesthetic appeal, and are more likely to make impulse purchases on a website with a high appeal (Constantinides, 2004; Kim and Eastin, 2011; Wang et al 2011).

Now Pinterest is a website typically for hedonic shoppers, and the aesthetic balance is heavily biased towards aesthetic appeal. While a website like apple.com where we can expect shoppers of both types is far more balanced in its aesthetic. On the other end of the scale we can put sites like Craigslist or maybe Ryanair, which you will only visit if you have a certain goal. These sites have an extensive amount of aesthetic formality, and little to no aesthetic appeal.

I will not list the entire list of literature in this post, you should be able to find it on scholar with the authors and year. Just send me a message if you would like to receive the list of articles.

Hey, can't find your email in your profile. Mine's in my profile. I'd love a list of articles.

Cheers

As a UX guy, the prevalence of the Pinterest layout has made me cringe a bit. But I think it definitely has a place, given a few caveats:

1) As others have said, if your site's purpose is more discoverability than navigability, then this layout may work for you.

2) This layout can work if you have the discipline to pare down on everything else. I've found that using Pinterest-style layouts has forced us to really reconsider whether content on our page needs to be there, since everything becomes so prominent. In some ways it's helped us flatten our IA.

As others have noted the widespread adoption of this style has probably little to do with Pinterest but more with masonry, the JS library that makes this easy to implement.

I'll be the contrarian here and say these kinds of layouts work better for me because they make much better use of my screen real estate on any device. I think this works well for social networking-type applications where you're skimming through a message stream anyway, or for shopping sites (such as Ikea) where items jump out at you because the human visual system is very fast at image filtering.

So I like it. Maybe tiling style layout in general is overused, but I'd rather see that than any more of those fixed-width column things even where content doesn't necessarily have to be linear.

I'm glad you've mentioned Masonry. Literally just yesterday evening we tried something new with an app that we'd been working on for a good while now, instead of having standard sized items in a Twitter like (top to bottom) timeline we thought we'd lay the items out left to right - this meant we had variable height divs divs stacked row by row - and we have thousands of them.

The fact that they are variable height puts you in a tricky position because it throws the rows off totally. Stacking them using Masonry was something that happened out of evolution, not by a "lets make it look like Pinterest" mentality.

While plenty of people will be cloning the UI of Pinterest because of its successes you can't write it off as a solution to a problem.

I'll know by the end of next week if it was worth it!

Pinterest makes "browsing" fun for a lot of people and it works very well at that. Pinterest does show specific categories of content. A similar experience to compare is Google images, where you provide a keyword and get a similar infinite-grid layout. Not everyone is searching for something specific; if a user can browse (or view by keyword, as in Google Images) they can gain inspiration or direction toward a goal.

Pinterest's UX approach is not worthless - it can and does work for many interaction scenarios where users want to browse content rather than search something specific.

Further, I think the two UX paradigms (search vs browse) can work together to serve the needs of users. Search for specific content can provide exact results first, and then related/similar results can display in a browsable pinterest-style grid.

As someone who have done my fair share of work with with masonery view among other things this

http://apps.facebook.com/pinviewer/

I would say that the pinterest view is great for anyone who want to show a huge amount of pictures in different sizes in order to allow people to browse or explore.

For most other things a feed is faster. But a mixture could somehow work IMHO (as you can see in the example)

Reminds me of all those UX guys who look at designs and try to think it through logically and make arguments from their own authority instead of from data. I remember articles linked here where the designer said users will study all the options on the page before picking one, lol. Pinterest layouts do well in user studies and do well in helping people find something interesting to engage without before ditching your site. Because that's what most people do. Quick scan of site, don't read anything entirely, nothing interesting, go somewhere else. Meanwhile, when implementing Pinterest layouts and user testing them, we've gotten feedback that these thing little knowledge or story or interest bites or whatever are actually making people feel smarter. It's mentally rewarding to users to have these little useless mind snacks scattered across the page that they quickly skim and feel accomplished about. Sure it doesn't make sense to some clueless designer who tries to make up rules for everything and doesn't do user studies and tries to argue from authority, but that's the way it is.

Pinterest wouldn't be the best fit for link sharing sites like Pinchit; the layout emphasizes pictures over textual content.

I has worked well for an open source images+poetry app I'm beta testing now, http://www.poe3.com. I don't have enough content to show personalized pages yet, so letting users scan the images on the page has been useful.

A brilliant way to display poetry, I'll definitely give you that. I think the overarching message here is that it works a lot better for art than anything else.

Cool idea. And a four letter domain name. Impressive!

Thanks. :)

I think that the author is correct to an extent. One thing that Pinterest has done is set a precedent for successful design thats predominantly visual (images, videos, media). This improved the standard of either glossy buttons or text in general. It made navigating content a much more engaging experience than it was before.

So while I do think that some websites are using the layout excessively or incorrectly (and some just straight up copy, like Pinchit) - there is a lot of value in the direction that Pinterest has chosen in displaying its content. It's one that has reflected a ripple effect in web design, as photographic and video content effectively grabs the user's attention on other platforms (ie. Facebook).

As always, the take-away is that we need design with purpose and must be evaluating its effects. Not arbitrarily hopping on trends just because.

The Pinterest layout, with some additions and modifications, could be a powerful way for people to use computers.

Think of music files. People have a bunch of MP3 files stored in a variety of different directories, perhaps with cover arts.

Presenting a pinterest style grid list of cover art already makes sense. Include ability to preview the song from the view, as well as launching the media player. (And then build playlist creation in too.) Now add ability to group by genre, or time, or BPM, or "your friends who liked this also liked" (or 'random people on this website who liked this also liked'). You then add a mode for 'discover music not local to your computer', with links to shops or YouTube or Myspace (is it still used by bands?) or whatever.

I'd freaking love it.

No no no (for music at least). I have absolutely no idea what the mythical CD/ablum case for 95% of the music I've bought in the last 12 years looks like. Now I'm using it to organize all of my songs? Let alone the hundreds of live concert podcasts that have the same identical bland image for their cover art.

Now, if you want to say that "listening to the radio" is an abstraction of the UX in the article, sure. And a "curated stream of music" is the way most people discover new stuff and seems to be the way the people I know use pinterest.

I recall reading an article somewhere that said Pinterest's layout is working for them because women love the infinite scroll. Since their users are mostly female, that's probably another reason why it works for them.

Although as a counterpoint, infinite scroll wasn't successful at Etsy and their audience is also primarily female:

http://danwin.com/2013/01/infinite-scroll-fail-etsy/

Women love using an information layout analogous to a physical format that's been obsolete for 1500 years due to having been superseded by pagination, and in which one loses one's place whenever attempting to reference previous information?

Pinterest is an anomaly; infinite scroll is broken in concept.

How can someone honestly claim that women love infinite scroll? The people who 'love' infinite scroll are the designers who decide this stuff is useful...which in my view makes for an inferior UX. The reason infinite scroll is bad is because if you want to look through a ton of information and click on any result, you can't just go back to where you were in your search results — instead you have to scroll (infinitely) back to your previous destination because whatever results you were looking at wouldn't be cached. Want to bookmark or share a page of the results you're looking at? Or what if you'd like to skip ahead to the results closer to the last page? Good luck with that on an infinite scroll site.

Yeah, I don't agree with this guy, its not worthless, its just diferent, worthless would be designs that are too confusing or elaborate to get the job done, just because its overload, doesnt mean it doesnt get the job done, also personally i do like cluttered layouts for random stuff, if its important its less usefull but if its just random tidbits its actually way more useful and fast, same goes for small print! its useful for somethings and not so much for others, so this guys all or nothing opinion is kinda meh!

How about this classifieds website, http://www.HouseOfNothing.com ? This website predated Pinterest. So it is not a copy-cat. It uses five column image thumbnails display, and it keeps them on the same level so the visitors do not get disoriented when they land on the site. The front page limits the display to 10 rows. It does not automatically extend itself to create an infitite flow of images.. Would it fix some of the problems mentioned in the article?

The other example i've seen working of this layout "Tokyo Otaku Mode" http://otakumode.com/

Not sure if it's because of Ubuntu, but your font sucks. It's unreadable, and yes other webpages look "normal" to me.

It is pretty much unreadable in Firefox on OS X too.

Really? I've never heard that complaint before. I didn't do much of anything outside of pick a standard Wordpress template, so I can't imagine it would use a font that isn't pretty universal.

It's supposed to look like this: http://www.designfreebies.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/fre...

My hosting service has been having trouble serving assets recently. I'm wondering if that might be the problem...

it does look like this, and it is unreadable, sorry mate

Most WordPress themes have bad typography. The first thing I do with most WordPress themes I check out is change to a good sans-serif font at 14-18px and a good line height. I also fix the link colors, which most themes make indistinguishable from each other and the body text.

WordPress theme creators could learn a lot from Tumblr theme creators.

In regards to the part about it being impossible to find something on pinterest, CTRL+F is your friend. That is, of course, if it's something you've seen before. The pinterest layout is great for galleries/portfolios. Outside of that, as the author mentions, there's not a lot of use.

90% of people don't know how to use CTRL-F, according to Google

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-...

Surely whether or not Pinterest can make this layout work to guide the eye or promote some action is going to determine whether or not they're successful in a business sense, though?

Also their search is worthless http://ajean.net/2012/12/16/pinterest-search-is-pitiful/

From the article:

> Run a search on Pinterest it gives you totally irrelevant search relevant.

> If Pinterest needs to move forward then their search factor needs to improve else its just another bookmarking website with a different theme.

Uhm, what?

I've noticed another bad practise: many sites use Masonry-like plugins for everything - even to build simple grid layout where each item has equal size.

Stop using Masonry for everything!

I am so sick of seeing pinterest style sites. Are people just not that creative that they can't create a new style? I am starting to see blogs with Masonry style.

Meilishuo would probably disagree since they're making a ton of money with it.

http://www.meilishuo.com/welcome

I simply dont agree. Many sites are right now using Pinterest style of layouts which are masonry inspired. An example will be http://jquer.in

Please stop advertising.

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