PINTEREST BUSINESS:
ONBOARDING
PINTEREST
H2 2019
OVERVIEW
Pinterest serves two main user types: everyday “Pinners” or consumers, and businesses with professional accounts, which drove ad sales and essentially all profits of the company. Anyone looking to set up a business account on Pinterest, from an individual entrepreneur to corporate heavyweights, needed to complete the signup flow.
A complicated and lengthy process, this flow was the primary barrier to entry for users, who were supported by multiple large-scale teams in the company. Coordination between teams to redesign the onboarding process would be tedious, but we set out to prove why it was necessary and how we could iterate our way there.
LOGISTICS
TEAM
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2 designers:
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myself, senior designer on Creator Growth
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the design lead for Business Growth
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TIMELINE
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6 months total
PINTEREST'S MISSION
Bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love.
BUSINESS + CREATOR GROWTH'S MISSION
Grow the number of businesses and creators on Pinterest that inspire Pinners to create a life they love.
THE CHALLENGE
The business onboarding experience for users creating business accounts on Pinterest was not meeting their needs. With a complicated, 15-step process required to even create an account, we were failing to help businesses understand how Pinterest could help them meet their goals.
GOALS
OVERALL GOAL
To create a holistic onboarding experience that adapts to different users in order for all businesses to find success on Pinterest
INTENDED OUTCOMES
Higher quality content on Pinterest:
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Inspirational pins
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Product Pins
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Effective ads
Increase in retained users with:
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a higher propensity to spend on ads
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frequent content creation
PROBLEMS TO SOLVE
A LENGTHY SIGNUP FLOW
To create an account, users needed to complete a lengthy flow full of complicated actions, all before even landing in your account home page.
After completing the lengthy signup process, users were dumped into an empty, uninspiring dashboard with minimal guidance, leaving them to fend for themselves.
EXISTING RESEARCH
We gathered lots of previous research and data, both qualitative and quantitive, to make a case for the existing experience’s shortcomings. We had done onboarding studies with different user types to get feedback on what they thought of the process.
Many smaller businesses showed confusion about the process and if it could even meet their needs, and data showed that most users skipped vital, yet cumbersome, steps that would be key to their later success on the platform. If these key steps were skipped in the setup flow, there was no further guidance provided to users once setup was complete, requiring users to search on their own, resulting in a large number of help requests.
UPDATING OUR USER TYPES
We traditionally tended to group our users into four main types: individual creators who wanted to advertise, creators who weren’t interested in ads, businesses who wanted to advertise, and businesses who didn’t. However, this segmentation was more of a result of company team structure rather than user reality, and was a massive oversight of differing user needs. Not to mention, businesses and creators may not be interested in advertising at the moment of account creation, but our goal should have been to move them towards creating ad revenue later on.
In actuality, our users varied across a spectrum of business size, ability, need, and intent.
OUR PROPOSAL
A PHASED APPROACH TO ONBOARDING
Every step of the onboarding process was there for a good reason. Our proposal however, was to minimize the steps required to sign up so users felt the satisfaction and benefit of creating their accounts sooner, and then help guide users through the other steps in a phased and guided approach as they continued to strengthen their presence.
PHASE 0: SIGNUP
We wanted to reframe the signup flow as exactly that: a quick flow to setup your account, before you enter into the actual product. We stripped out everything that wasn’t necessary to assess what type of user was creating the account and to gauge their immediate product needs.
This minimization took the signup flow from 15 steps down to 5.
PHASE 1: COMPLETE YOUR ACCOUNT
Emphasizing a celebratory, guided experience, we first land users inside of their account on their new business dashboard. We positioned this as a dynamic place that would meet the needs of different user types at different points of their journey. Early on, the space would primarily aim to assist with setup and provide access to education. We also wanted to give opportunity for self-motivated actions like adding products or creating Pins or ads.
PHASE 2: ACTIVATE THE BUSINESS
As users progressed through their account journey, the dashboard would shift to accommodate their shifting needs and focus.
PHASE 3: MAKE, MONITOR, AND GROW
Completed account dashboards would shift to emphasize an overview of content and performance, while always providing access to additional training, support, and jumping off points to dive deeper.
WORK IN-PROGRESS
Teams across Pinterest Business had already begun making small changes to improve user experience that were providing promising signal on the return on investment for additional work in this area. From improved in-product education and performance feedback to improved comms to support developing businesses, we were on the right track.
COORDINATED IMPLEMENTATION
CONTINUED PLANS FOR THE NEXT HALF
To continue development with blessings from the CEO and larger org, we planned to:
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Continue to improve signal-gathering
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Complete the project to reduce screens in signup
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Continue projects leveraging “Biz hub” or the business dashboard to provide clear steps for users based on their stated goals, as well as data we knew about the trajectories of their user segment.
OUTCOMES
RECEPTION
With the support of the Head of Design, our proposal was well received by the CEO and head of Product. Alongside additional projects focused on shoring up shopper trust and merchant reliability, we continued to revise onboarding. I was promoted to Lead Designer on the Creator Platform team soon after, and a final Biz NUX redesign based on our original proposal was eventually completed by the Business Growth team the following year and is still in use today.