Pinterest being the third most visited website in US has yet to achieve the same success outside US. Pinterest has been around since 2010, but it withdrew all attention from mainly last year due to some reasons like the launch of its iPhone app, Facebook integrating it into it’s open graph, etc
Ther are some of its shortcomings in usability which made it common in news these days. We are mentioning some of them below.
1. Home page: The biggest problem is when we land up on home page. Yes it is appealing for the first few times but later on, it appears as a visual junk yard.
2. Search: now a day’s crowd spends maximum time on social media and when you join any network you look for the “Search” feature to explore more. Once you have joined all your friends, you would love to find more people or boards to explore more. In the case of Pinterest, the search becomes more important since it is a site about pictures and we love to see more and more of them. Definitely Pinterest has a search but then it can make it better, which would allow pinners to connect to others easily. Certainly, some advanced features are required to the basic search Pinterest is providing as of now.
3. Interest based content: From consuming everything, we are moving onto curated information. Other than following the same set of friends from Facebook and Twittter, can Pinterest show content from a person that is of our interest. Pinterest has categories but they are very broad and again neither can they be sorted nor displayed in a way that I would want.
4. Popular: The Popular tab is useful to explore more but lacks features like customizations and showing me what is popular in my network. Can the tab have categories so that it can list all popular pins or boards under one category, wouldn’t that be helpful? Besides this, it would be great if Pinterest can populate a small feed which will show me what is popular in my network too. Popular is a great feature but right now it has not been designed to be used to its full extent.
5. Social Sharing: Pinterest has an option to disable social sharing to your networks but why is it that every time it has to populate all my activities and show people on other networks. Wouldn’t it be great if I have the control on what to show and what not to?
It’s Time for Pinterest to think on this direction too. However if Pinterest adopt the route of Google Plus or Twitter in releasing required features,it will affect the user’s experience, which could turn away users from the network.
Good points. These things bothered me too as I use Pinterest. The search feature being absent put me down.