I contracted with Pinterest for several months on a team directly adjacent to the team responsible for designing, testing, and building the logged out home page you see here. It was very thorough, going through immense amounts of research with a multitude of completely different design experiences, and this page (and the others in this set) tested better than everything else throughout the process. And the team didn't simply A/B test what had the highest conversion, they tested sentiment in terms of: "After converting from this specific experience, is using the actual product in line with what that landing page led me to believe?"

I got to see this process firsthand, be in meetings that involved discussions around how to handle a massively important project like this, and I couldn't imagine the team doing a better job.

It's easy to dismiss this when you aren't a user and don't see it as useful for you specifically. But the landing page isn't aimed at you. It's aimed at many demographics who could find it useful if they arrived here. And in that regard, after seeing the improvement in actual conversion data myself, I find it successful thus far.

The likely rationale behind the immediate experience of a site that traffics in millions of uniques is that 'the numbers say that the visitors who respond positively to this outweigh the visitors who respond negatively'. In particular, I'd be willing to guess that Pinterest used gendered language in their lead-in because they're in a unique position of having a female user base which outnumbers their male one, and the bounce rate here is much smaller than opening pinterest.com to see a smorgasbord of recipes and pictures of clothing in sepia.

A lot of your other complaints (like expecting the 45 seconds to be a timer) appear to be intentionally dense: I don't mean that to disparage you, but I think your interpretation is quite different than the average person Pinterest is trying to entice (that is, one with an average amount of experience on the internet.)

Pinterest's value add is applying "pinteresty" context to media objects. A link is just a link, an image just an image, text is just text. But we tune in to sites that deliver more context in addition to sharing those links.

An image shared on Tumblr has tags, affinity score, related notes, reblogged discussions.

That same image existing on Flickr has EXIF data, geotags, discussions.

On Facebook there's value based on perceived relevancy in my friend group.

That same image existing on Pinterest has context such as categorization, relations, and scoring.

For people in those self-identified communities they apply more value to those things on a daily, hourly, and even second by second basis.

Until it's no longer relevant.

Nah, you're probably just a cynical pedant. Pinterest has one of the clearest and most compelling landing pages of any social network ever. Not to mention it's a household name now, they're nearly at a point of recognition like Facebook or Google.

You don't see Google explaining what they do anymore do you?

I'm the developer on the Growth Team @ Pinterest that built the experience in question.

First, thanks for the candid feedback. We always strive to understand users and better their experience (in this instance from the very first second they come in touch with Pinterest).

The overhaul of the unauth home page, which is internally dubbed "inspired wall", is a concept that we introduced and refined over a period of a few months. As the name suggests the idea behind it is to instantly connect with you on the level of a story(or a use case) of Pinterest that can inspire you and stick with you as you go through the signup and orientation process. It is a hint of what Pinterest could be for you not written in words but rather expressed through a visual composition. The further you get into the product the more we tailor the experience around things that you love and the story that they tell about you.

We actually did quite extensive testing around this experience because it is such an essential and sensitive part of the product. This included concept research (where we tried to identify what got people to use Pinterest), A/B testing (where we quantitatively showed that results were better than the previous home page), and user testing (where we qualitatively showed that people get better understanding and satisfaction with the product). One of the key findings was that people were able to instantly grasp how Pinterest is different from other popular services such as Instagram or Flickr. To put in music channel terms - it did a good job at explaining how MTV is different than VH1.

Obviously the work is not done and things can be improved. The inspired wall is still a relatively fresh concept and we continue iterating over it.

We plan on releasing an engineering blog post soon that will detail the process of rebuilding our unauth home page and the several iterations that it went through to be successful. Stay tuned and again thanks for the feedback.

Ludo

I'm guessing you're a male?

Last I checked, Pinterest was overwhelmingly used by women, which is both a blessing (very few web sites appeal so massively to women) and a curse (they are trying hard to find out how they can attract males).

Edit: Add link to article that made me think of Pinterest differently: http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/15/scaling-pinterest-...