How PINTEREST's design team works

We always wonder how the big international designers are working, do they change all night and work overtime on weekends? How do they like to sort the PSD? How does the team work together? How to inspire creativity to come up with such a novel and interesting idea? We need answers hidden in the lines of these interviews.

Pinterest is such a company that will often arouse our curiosity. What is the experience of working in this company with Twitter support in the design field? Let Pinterest's product designer, Justin Edmund, talk to us about their design work.

It's not easy to work in a Pinterest product design team, but the work itself is very interesting. Everyone on the team is very friendly, humble and highly gifted. Working in Pinterest means we need to create a platform that really connects people around the world to help them find what they like and live their dreams. How can this kind of work not be fascinated by people?

At the end of 2012, Pinterest creative team photo.

Me and my team.

I was the first member to be recruited into the Pinterest product design team and has been working here for 3 years now. Our product design team has 9 full-time designers, 3 part-time designers, and a product manager, product design team under the Pinterest creative team, by the United founder Evan Sharp Unified Leadership.

Although we are Pinterest's product design team, product design is not the only thing we need to design. With our creative team, we need to extend the tentacles of our design--brand design, research, and copywriting--we all need to be involved, and know that as many as 160 people in the creative department, our 25-person team is not big.

Design is a vital part of the Pinterest strategy

Unlike other companies and companies, in Pinterest, our design is not limited to products, because Pinterest itself as a platform has included a lot of category content, its fundamental purpose is to inspire people and make life more full and rich, Through a variety of different content to motivate people to pursue these things, to achieve the once unreachable dream. (This initial idea is more plump than the domestic petals.) )

Therefore, the final Pinterest client also became a design friendly and easy to use product, this kind of thinking put into product design, make "Pinterest can make life better, let the dream is within reach and" have more obvious authenticity.

Functions of the Pinterest

At first, Pinterest's goal was to "weave", to "weave" and combine information and content from different fields. It is because of this great idea that when different people come together and do something together, it is a huge challenge to make each person's ideas and opinions not buried. Therefore, part of our product team's work is to create a unified and reliable interactive interface for different functions of companies. With this, the product design team will be able to smoothly from different people where to get advice, and give appropriate responses, and ultimately solve the problem.

Pinterest's employees are participating in a project's "Play" link.

In my opinion, the best projects have one thing in common: all project participants are aware of the challenges they face, can take other features into account, and adjust their work accordingly according to the information. As a technology enterprise, we are becoming better and more, and gradually realize the dream of the cross domain, and gradually reached a relatively high level. I don't think Pinterest should be labeled "Engineer Enterprise" or "design company" because it's not accurate. If you really want to use a label to illustrate the properties of Pinterest, I think it should be "cross-domain Enterprise", although it sounds strange, but I think it is very reasonable.

Users and Interests

"Put Pinners first" (Pinterest user is pinners, user priority) should be one of Pinterest's most widely known values. And as a product designer of ours, this concept is also to help us measure all the standards. Many times, we need to measure how to better meet the needs of pinners, the feasibility of technology, if feasible, then whether it is beneficial to the development of the team and the company, and so on. This kind of decision-making is not easy to advance, especially when you need to meet the needs of all parties.

But generally speaking, satisfying pinners is always beneficial to the development of the company. But most of the time when the plan works, it may not be technically mature, or the staff is not enough to implement the program. When we encounter such obstacles, different teams work together, compromise, and find a reasonable solution.

In the 2013, Pinners and we explored how to make pins more practical.

We have a large number of other teams involved in designing the interface for the user. In order to design a better product, we need to understand the user's real demand. So, the research team is the team with the highest frequency of collaboration, and they will help us with usability and participatory design research. In addition, we will often meet with the data analysis team to solve some of the outstanding problems. Of course, we will also get first-hand information with the Community operations team to understand common problems and the need for new features.

Product design Process

Pinterest product designers have multiple roles

• Product Strategy: We will introduce user-oriented projects from the outset to help us choose the right direction

• Interactive design: This is our core competency, broadly speaking, it includes system architecture, experiential design and cognitive psychology.

• Visual Design: We maintain the Pinterest design language and update it when necessary. In order to maintain the overall quality, we will redraw the icons when necessary, and these icons and the original paintings are occasionally outsourced to those especially talented friends.

• Product Design: We will apply for specific staff to solve some of the "necessary evil." We will cut down some nuances parts according to the needs of the development team, although very trivial, but will make the user experience better.

Our product designer Jason Wilson is sketching a prototype to solve a small problem.

How our product designers work

Our product designers are free to choose the best and most efficient way to work, on the premise of ensuring communication and contact. As a result, different products and teams follow different processes. Although the design process is changeable, it still largely follows this basic process:

1, collect information (data analysis, qualitative research, or feedback from the user)

2. Explore the general direction

3, the production of prototypes, iterations and improve the direction

4, publish, research

In general, we will prioritize the issues and then consider the platform. After a comprehensive consideration, we can find a solution that spans the entire platform. At this time, we will try our best to take care of the uniqueness of each platform and make sure the Pinterest is more natural on every platform.

The technical foundation of the product design and design team:

• Most of our work is done on Photoshop and sketch, with code and hand-drawn sketches, of course.

• We think that designers need to maintain a minimum of familiarity with the technology. Even if our designers do not have to develop the program, but also to ensure the smooth communication with the engineer team

• We use Basecamp to share our work to ensure instant feedback, and of course we're still exploring more tools available.

This JavaScript tool, called Pinkit, is developed specifically for the product design team and facilitates the use of real-time data to build prototypes.

The future of Pinterest

Pinterest is a very good place for designers. You will encounter all kinds of problems when you work here, because when you solve these problems, you can always learn new things. Pinterest has been trying to absorb the world's leading product designers, if you have the opportunity, you must not miss.