We're Testing Out A New Look!
We're excited to announce that we'll be testing an update to Pinterest.com with a small group of people soon. With this update, we've tried to take your feedback into account. We're eager to learn even more from some of you during this test.
Context & Ripple Effects
Pinterest says it will put an updated Pinterest.com in front of a small test group, framing the change as a response to user feedback rather than a finished relaunch. The announcement landed across eight outlets on the same day — TechCrunch, Business Insider, the Los Angeles Times, CNET, AllThingsD, Marketing Land, SocialTimes and VentureBeat — a measure of how closely the consumer web was tracking Pinterest's product moves at this stage of its growth.
The redesign also sits inside a broader exchange of design language between the big social platforms: six months earlier, Facebook was testing a Pinterest-inspired layout for app stories in its News Feed, evidence that Pinterest's visual-grid format had become something rivals were borrowing even as Pinterest itself reworked its own interface.
First-order effects
- A small cohort of Pinterest users gets the updated site first, with their reactions feeding directly into whether and how the redesign ships more broadly.
Second-order effects
- Rival social products — Facebook chief among them, given its own Pinterest-borrowed feed experiments — face a moving target: if the refresh lands well, the visual-discovery bar for feeds and boards rises across the category.
Third-order effects
- Staged small-group testing is becoming the default playbook for major consumer-web redesigns, letting platforms deprecate or adjust changes before backlash hardens — and pushing social platforms toward a converged, image-first interface vocabulary.
The trend: Consumer social platforms are converging on visually dense, grid-based discovery interfaces, with incremental cohort-tested rollouts replacing big-bang redesigns.