#evansharp

Pinterest mastermind departs for Jony Ive’s new design firm. | Fastcompany

Source: Pinterest mastermind departs for Jony Ive’s new design firm. Evan Sharp, Cofounder of Pinterest. [Photo: courtesy Pinterest] It’s really about (self–) evolution and growing, right? At least for me it always was, no matter the scenario, outfit or role.

When Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann was young, he used to collect stamps obsessively. He also had an impressive bug collection, many of which he dried out and pinned himself, curating his very own mini nature museum. It’s a quaint but true story that lead to him building arguably the world's most effective e-commerce engine.

It was only a matter of time before that love of collecting stuff translated into something digital.  Harboring ambitions of becoming a doctor like the rest of his family, he eventually took a job at Google as an account exec until he figured out how to launch his own start-up.

His first attempt, a shopping app called Tote, didn’t get very far and ran out of seed money within a year. His next venture, Pinterest, has become slightly more successful - so to explain what makes it so special, here are 20 quotes and stats from Ben and co-founder Evan Sharp that you might not know...

  Pinterest’s mission statement is to tell the world (in 10 seconds), “Here are the beautiful things that make me who I am, or who I want to be”.

“When you open up Pinterest you should feel like you’ve walked into a building full of hand-picked stuff that only you are interested in”. (Co-Founder Ben Silbermann)

80% of the top 15 Pinterest categories are connected to commerce.

Pinners are 80% female and predominantly 25-54 year olds.

Pinterest was always designed to be a tablet experience. 55% of users now pin from an iPad (17% pin from an iPhone / 28% from an Android device).

The average sale resulting from a Pinterest user making a purchase online is $180 (according to RichRelevance research) compared to only $80 for Facebook and $70 for Twitter.

Founders Ben and Evan refused to structure Pinterest like a traditional website saying, that’s not the way you discover content. It’s not the way you shop and it’s not the way you go through a museum. So we won’t use any navigation trees”.

When the iPad app launched, it was No.1 on the app store within a day.

Google is great at targeting people who have shown “purchase intent”, but Pinterest is designed to talk to you in the same way a shop assistant would, showing you stuff that you didn’t realize you liked.

“Amazon and Google suck at browsing. You can spend 3 hours buying a $20 toaster. Pinterest lets you browse in the same way you would in a shopping mall, bouncing from Gap to Nike to Yankee Candle”. Pinterest designer and co-founder Evan Sharp

Just like Apple stores, Pinterest doesn’t care about big product catalogs, it curates a small selection of carefully chosen products for it’s customers - which is why it encourages users to only share and re-pin things of "good taste".

The Pinterest app is built upon a system of windows called “sheets”, which let you flip between boards in the same way that would bounce from shop-to-shop in a shopping mall.

The central element of Pinterest’s UI is it’s infinite scroll. Digital marketers have always said this is a bad idea because you can’t track page views, but this is what makes Pinterest so addictive. People don’t need to click buttons or wait for pages to load, so they end up spending much more time on the site – an average of over 14 minutes per visit. #Genius

As of October 2012, Pinterest has 20,470,000 users

Pinterest generates 1.9bn unique page views globally (79% of traffic is from US).

When Pinterest first launched, co-founder Ben Silbermann gave out his email and cell number to the first 5,000 pinners, chatting to them every day about product tweaks and bugs. He keeps in regular contact with them today.

The reason Pinterest was initially invite only was because founders Ben and Evan felt like they were “building a little city with no one inside of it”. They were selective about who the early adopters were because they wanted them to teach new pinners what they should be doing when they move in (eg. Not posting Facebook-style drunken party and friend photos).

Pinterest bans nudity and discourages any users posting images of thinspiration which glamorize heroin-chic skinny super models.

In May 2012, Pinterest received an investment of $100m from Japanse e-commerce giant Rakuten, valuing the company at $1.5bn, even though Pinterest hasn’t started to generate any revenue yet.

The most popular user on Pinterest is penguin-lover Jane Wang with 3.4 million followers. She also happens to be Ben Silbermann’s mum.

Click here for more Pinspiration and Infographics

The October 2012 issue of Fast Company magazine had an interesting article on Pinterest and the design decisions that were involved in the creation of the site.

You can check out the complete article here: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670681/ben-silbermann-pinterest

Time lapse detail of how this portrait of Ben Silbermann made out of push pins was created.

Here's what I found most interesting about the site:

This quote: "Browsing in e-commerce is a more difficult problem than search," says Leland Rechis, a director of product experience at Etsy. "Amazon and Google pretty much stink at browsing." 

Which was preceded by this description of Pinterest:

On first blush, Pinterest may sound like a hundred other social media websites where people share images and comment on them. But the design choices of Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann and his cofounder Evan Sharp, based on a new way of browsing that dispenses with the web’s rigid rules of presenting content, have made the service incredibly addictive. To create a pinboard is to say to the world, Here are the beautiful things that make me who I am--or who I want to be. Young women use Pinterest to plan their weddings, men collect watches and bikes into de facto gift registries, and couples assemble furniture sets for their new homes. Pictures of attractive men and women in various states of undress abound. The sum of each user’s choices is displayed in an ever-changing pastiche on each person’s home page. "When you open up Pinterest," Silbermann says, distilling his vision, "you should feel like you’ve walked into a building full of stuff that only you are interested in. Everything should feel handpicked for you." In other words, it’s a store in which every single product has been tailored to your needs, ambitions, and desires. What Pinterest has done is solve the problem of discovery on the web. And it has been a problem for a while. Let’s say you want to buy a gift for your mother. Nothing specific, just something nice. A search for "nice Mother’s Day gift" on Google--or even "very special, very expensive Mother’s Day gift"--isn’t going to be much help. Google depends on finely tuned queries in order to yield useful results. (This makes Google a great advertising platform, because it delivers customers who have already expressed an intention to buy something.) But talk to Google the way you might talk to a clerk at a department store, and it won’t know where to begin. You could go to the web’s superstore, Amazon, but that’s not much better. To browse, you have to go back and forth through a detailed system of menus, categories, and merchants while constantly being tempted by thousands of competing products at thousands of price points. "You spend three hours buying a $20 toaster," says Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore College and the author of The Paradox of Choice.  

And then there's this description of how the idea for - and design behind - Pinterest evolved: As they sketched out Pinterest, Silbermann and Sharp cast aside many then-predominant orthodoxies of web design. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and many other content-driven websites were organized around "feeds," lines of text or images that ran from top to bottom by time. The two young men wanted to create a design that allowed users to browse multiple images at once. "We were really excited about bringing something that wasn’t immediate and real time, something that wasn’t a chronological feed," says Sharp. ... The idea was to remove the rigid organizational strictures that the web imposed--directories, time stamps, pagination--and replace them with a grid of images that would feel more like visiting a store or a museum. Sharp coded much of the site sitting in a Whole Foods on the Upper West Side of Manhattan while Silbermann, Sciarra, and a single engineer worked from a dingy apartment in Palo Alto. They spent four months batting versions back and forth. "This was the first one," Sharp says, pulling up a grid of images whose borders turn a rather garish shade of royal blue when a mouse hovers over each image. "I must have been trying to give Ben a heart attack." Whereas most designers start with mock-ups, Sharp developed and coded 50 working versions of the site, experimenting with various column widths, layouts, and ways of presenting the pictures. "From the beginning, we were aware that if we were going to get somebody to spend all this time putting together a collection, at the very least, the collection had to be beautiful," Silbermann says. As Sharp puts it, "The grid was everything." His final version displayed interlocking images of a fixed width--192 pixels--and varying heights. When new images were pinned, the entire site would rearrange itself, meaning that users rarely saw the exact same home page twice. Pinterest’s design overturned conventional wisdom in a number of other surprising ways. Silbermann rejected the idea that entrepreneurs should hack something together, open it up to the public, and tweak, iterate, and pivot. At a time when "gamification" was hot, Silbermann and Sharp declined to feature any elements that might encourage pinners to compete with one another. Pinterest offered no leader board or any other way to find the most popular pinners, and unlike Twitter, which makes a person’s follower count the focal point of the site, Silbermann did not include it on the home page. Most web companies design their sites to generate lots of page views, which helps them show momentum to investors and, in theory, makes them more attractive to advertisers. This frequently means producing extra page views by any means necessary. A central element of Pinterest’s design, though, was the then-novel "infinite scroll," automatically loading more images as the user expands the web-browser window horizontally or goes toward the bottom of the page. The decision meant that Pinterest would generate fewer page views than most websites, but it also meant that users spent almost no time clicking buttons or loading pages. Silbermann and Sharp’s grid has since proliferated across the web. It has inspired numerous copycat sites that mimic its look and feel down to the font selections, and it has informed the design of Lady Gaga’s social network LittleMonsters.com, the question-and-answer site Quora, and even Facebook, which began testing a Pinterest-like layout in July. A Mashable article last February, full of favorable quotes from designers, declared, "Pinterest Is Changing Web Design Forever."

Check out this infographic in more detail.

I found it interesting that Pinterest has a weekly design review, where the company gets together as a whole to way in on their latest iterations-in-progress.

The focus of the two-hour critique was the company’s forthcoming iPad app, which Silbermann believes is critical to Pinterest’s ability to change the way people discover new things. "You can use a tablet in places and at times when your mind is free to explore stuff--like having a beer or sitting on the couch," Silbermann says. "Pinterest was made for tablets."

The app, which I tried as a beta version in July, includes a new feature called "sheets," which allows users to seamlessly trip through Pinterest pages in the same way one might bounce around a shopping mall. (The Summer of Apps concluded in mid-August when they went live. The iPad app was No. 1 in the App Store within a day.) With a finger flick, users can quickly cycle back and forth through pinboards, user profiles, and pages for topics like gardening or travel without ever returning to the home screen. "Most apps assume you have this navigation tree," says Sharp, as he shows off the new app. "But that’s not the way you discover. It’s not the way you shop. It’s not the way you go through a museum. That’s our interaction model."

Check out this infographic in more detail.

One of the big trends of 2011 has been the rise of Pinterest (and its subsequent influence throughout the rest of the 'net, as mentioned in this article). I thought Fast Company did a real good job of describing the history of the company, its evolution and the design choices that have led to what it is -- and what separates it from so much of what came before it.