Pinterest the social media bulletin board is testing a new design that it believes will enhance the popular site. Pinterest is looking to first provide clearer navigation. The site currently requires users to click a drop-down arrow to see a full list of feed categories. A screen shot of the latest design shows a new icon on the top left corner of the site’s layout with a drop down menu that holds several categories and subcategories. You now will be able to click it and open up options like “Popular Pins” and ““Following Feed,” as well as lots of different categories. The proposed new web design hopes to make navigating more intuitive “so it’s faster to get to where you want to go.”
Pins will also be bigger and include more image details that that will show more information. When you click to open a pin in the standard version of Pinterest, you see an image stuffed between big white sidebars. Pinterest figured there’s a lot more that could be done with that space. In the redesign, the pinned image is larger and surrounded with helpful content. You’ll see bigger thumbnails of other things pinned to the same board, and now they’re on the right instead of at the bottom. This is especially helpful for tall images that would bury additional content several folds down.
Pinterest hopes to keep you clicking more. The pin view will now show “a whole slew of related Pins.” Pinterest could now lead you on to related links all across the site. It can also provide recommendations of what fellow users viewed later.
“For example, on each pin, you’ll see pins from the same board, other boards this pin was pinned to, and a whole slew of related pins,” the company said in its blog.
In addition, Pinterest said it has made under-the-hood improvements to the site’s speed.
Pinterest isn’t ditching the grid-style “Masonry” design it’s known and cloned for. Overall, Pinterest writes that “we’ve tried to take your feedback into account.” If you want early access to the new look you can fill out a form on the Pinterest site.
