Web Model Analysis: The psychology behind Pinterest "Waterfall Flow"

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Pinterest is very red. According to comscore, the number of independent visitors to the Pinterest in January 2012 reached 11.7 million, the fastest-growing website for tens of millions of users, with the top six in the U.S. social networking site (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, MySpace, Google +, Tumblr, and home is a lot of shanzhai.

Why is Pinterest red? The reason is various, for example, to the user extremely low participation cost, the more flexible subscription mechanism reduces the information noise, the repin operation forms the viral proliferation mechanism and so on, but the more attention is its unique "waterfall flow" picture layout. This layout is a lot of criticism, but I like it, because although this idea from the founder of the site in the life of the inspiration, but it happens to conform to the human visual psychology of the law, the following analysis:

Here we start with the difference between the perception of the text and the content of the picture. People reading text is a serial mode, a word must be read linearly in a definite order, while the person viewing the picture is in parallel mode, and he can quickly scan through many pictures and then select the part of which he is interested, which is much more efficient than the linear mode of finding the content of interest.

So many typical product interface patterns follow this difference, such as:

1 Search Results page, if the Web search results are linear, if the image search results are matrix arrangement (Google and Bing's image search results page even removed all the text information, only the mouse hover in a picture will appear text, this design is to highlight the advantages of parallel browsing images );

2 SNS products, micro-blog Feed page are linear arrangement. But there is a problem here, if it is a plain text feed (if you know), linear arrangement is the best mode, and the text content of the feed (such as microblogging and SNS), you will find that browsing the image is less efficient, because the picture content is not suitable for linear row.

So the traditional image display is based on matrix mode, to engage in a staggered waterfall flow mode is how it? Here is the first thing to understand the impact of the human eye scanning path factors. This knowledge is derived from a large number of studies in the field of "visual search" in cognitive psychology. At present, the consensus of psychologists, the impact of visual search efficiency of the main factors are two: one is the existing experience and habits, is a top-down impact, the other is the visual significance of the screen itself, is a bottom-up impact. For the former, we all know that people are generally from the top down, from left to right to look, so a matrix of multiple picture pages, its scanning path is almost affected by this habit and some rigid. For the latter, the visual significance of the screen itself (dynamic, color and its overall aesthetic, etc.) constitutes a "significant map", in which the user's attention is first saliency by the most visible part of the screen. So the bottom-up factor (the picture itself) makes it easier for users to choose high quality visual content, while the scanning habits in rectangular mode can interfere with bottom-up factors.

For instance, in the search engine's image search results page, if there is a good picture in the lower right corner of the page, you may be in the upper left of the page wandering a few points to gradually find this image, and in the waterfall layout, you can find this image faster. So, linear mode is the best layout of text content, waterfall Flow mode is the best way to layout the picture content (so far).

Pinterest a better point is that users can choose their own preferences for the visual search of the Image: Although the page defaults to a 5-column picture, when you zoom out, each picture in the page shrinks, while the number of columns increases (up to 10 columns), and the number of pictures that are presented at the same time increases. This can increase search efficiency for some users.

Because waterfall flow mode is a very efficient image browsing interface, it attracts a lot of users as a tool to collect and appreciate pictures, which is the biggest power of Pinterest's rapid popularity.

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