The project that shifted my perspective as a designer

I’ll be honest: I used to avoid ads as a user. They had a poor reputation in my mind. But a recent project shifted my perspective, and now I see that the complexity of the business-facing side of the product can truly drive creativity and innovation — and it helped me grow as a product designer.

Here’s some of what I’ve learned so far:

The project that changed my mind about ads

As a designer on the Monetization team at Pinterest, my work helps businesses connect with users, while also creating products that help users create a life they love by connecting them with the right commercial opportunity at the right time in their journey from inspiration to realization.

But I recognize now that when I first joined the Ad Formats team I came in with a bias. I heavily prioritized the end user’s perspective on what they found appealing or annoying. My background in graphic design and previous agency experience further influenced me to focus more on the user-facing side of the product and visual solutions.

But the first ad format I worked on changed everything for me. The project was Quiz Ads, where users can engage with ads in a playful way for personalized recommendations or entertainment and discover unfamiliar brands along the way.

Innovating for businesses also means innovating for users

While designing the Quiz Ad flow, I realized that while working to drive business value, we are still able to create visually compelling and useful content for users.

By getting the option to narrow their results through the quiz format, we’re helping connect users to what they’re looking for faster — and in a fun and engaging way.

Designing a new interaction like Quiz Ads was highly creative. While designing this new, visually engaging product we presented businesses with several opportunities:

• Build deeper, more targeted brand connections with their audience: This new, engaging format allows advertisers to create unique and memorable moments while reducing the friction to engage with content.
• Unlock scale and connect with users where they are looking for inspiration: Quiz Ads pull up and enhance evaluation that previously happened on external microsites outside of Pinterest that were costly and cumbersome to build.
• Better measure success: Advertisers can access more substantial post-campaign insights and learnings.
• Create Custom Audiences of Pinterest users: Businesses can create audiences who have interacted with specific events — these audiences can be used for targeting and retargeting.

I was beginning to see what it meant to work on creative solutions that deliver an excellent end-user experience while also unlocking business value. But this project led to another big shift for me — in addition to focusing on the end-user experience and driving value for our users, I also began to see our advertisers as users too.

What seeing businesses as users unlocked for me

With the help of my team, I transitioned from solving only end-user problems to solving advertiser problems as well. I learned more about their business needs, goals and how they operate.

Our team has a process for designers and researchers to convene and share their work in progress to collect feedback in order to think deeper through problems and make higher-quality design decisions. Our researchers occasionally invite Ad Account Managers to add visceral advertiser perspectives and pain points to the conversation. I benefited greatly from these designer studio crits and, through rounds of iterations fueled by qualitative research sessions, we were able to deliver a more polished experience for general access and a creation process for a brand-new format that was easy for advertisers to understand and use.

As I began to work on the back-end of the advertiser experience for Quiz Ads, I discovered my interest in designing tools. As I learned more about the hoops and hurdles advertisers had to go through on ad creation tools on any platform, including ours, I developed empathy for their pain and frustration.

This helped me further recognize advertisers as users with more specific needs and goals and learned that their needs are not always in conflict with end-user experience.

Advertisers’ needs for tooling felt more specific and measurable, making the resolution of their issues and meeting their needs highly gratifying. While advertisers’ objectives are often straightforward, designing scalable solutions that fit within a complex system presented a compelling challenge.

My perspective on ads now

This project helped me realize that creating solutions that work for both the user- and business-facing sides of the product truly drives creativity and innovation. Solving this complexity helped me grow as a product designer, and the solutions my team and I deliver are helping drive significant business impact, which is enormously rewarding.

How we drove business value and innovation on user-facing experiences from the business-side of the product

• Delivered new experiences: Before we launched Quiz Ads, advertisers on Pinterest had fewer ad format options to choose from, let alone ones that can drive deeper awareness and engagement through interactions. We created a whole new interaction pattern that opened up different ways users can engage with an ad, and delivered a new experience on Pinterest.
• Continued innovation: We’re continuing to innovate our Quiz Ads to bring more visuals and personality into the experience. Our vision is to enable advertisers to show up in exciting and interesting ways to connect with their audience, learn from their interactions and enhance their creation process so that they have more control and efficiency.
• Increased revenue: We’ve helped drive significant revenue already since the limited launch a few months ago.¹
• Increased value for advertisers: Our Beta test showed an increased completion rate and significant increases in brand awareness and action intent.²

I’m very excited to continue working on the next iteration of the Quiz Ad format. We plan to evolve into a more visually engaging and seamless experience on Pinterest. Tooling will be enhanced to accommodate more specific advertiser needs and make the creation process more comprehensive and efficient.

Working on the Ad Formats team has helped me develop a deeper understanding of Pinterest’s mission to bring users inspiration and allow them to take action to create a life they love. Ads on Pinterest will continue to mature to become an enjoyable part of the experience that empowers users to take action while enabling advertisers to explore creative and performant ways to show up and inspire their audience. Today, I see ads as an opportunity to innovate.

Footnotes
¹ Pinterest Internal Data, Quiz & Showcase Beta, Q3 2023.
² Pinterest Internal Data, Quiz & Showcase Beta, Q3 2023.