Good morning and happy Wednesday, everyone! Here is a thing that falls under Today In Very Good Things: Pinterest is going to, finally, finally, let you move pins around on your boards.
This seems really small and trivial but, really, this is one of the biggest quality of life improvements to the service that I’ve seen (and probably many others) in many months now. Pinterest has been working on things like improving their image recognition, investing heavily in visual search, raising a lot of money and generally just trying to get big, but now as a very pleasant Valentine’s Day surprise Pinterest is letting you do a thing that should feel totally natural but definitely didn’t exist yet for some reason.
The change today is part of a number of small quality-of-life improvements for Pinterest users, especially ones whose tastes will change over time. For example, if you used a Pinterest board to get married and are, well, married, then you don’t really need that board any more other than maybe for nostalgia’s sake. As you can imagine, these are probably requests that are in high demand — and Pinterest said this themselves — but are likely sitting on the queue while a bunch of other high-priority stuff gets rolled out (like upgrades to Lens and things along those lines).
Here’s a quick rundown of the changes happening today:
- You can now archive boards. This is filed under Very Good Things. At least, in my case, aside from my Board of Very Wishful Thinking when it comes to home design, a lot of these boards aren’t really necessary any more. There are a lot of reasons why this would help a lot as Pinterest is a good hub for planning out big life events like weddings or parties.
- You can now rearrange pins(!!!!). Again, self-explanatory, especially if you are someone who is very picky about how things are ordered.
- You can now rearrange sections. See above.
- You can now sort pin boards. See above, except for a few specific sorting orders.
Again, these seem small, but really, these small improvements add up a lot over time. And sometimes these little innocuous changes may require under-the-hood tooling (and yes it indeed did require it) to figure out. Often times little boring tweaks are the ones that can cause a dramatic shift in overall user happiness — and they’re the ones that are often in demand. As someone who is wildly obsessive about how things look, even on a convoluted screen of stuff that has only a loose association with whatever the board is called. People like customization — one of our staffers (not naming names) even orders his screen by the color of the app — and little things like this are important.
And that’s also pretty important for the company as it looks to continue to grow and retain those users, who little annoyances may actually drive away some of your best users. These probably don’t rank very far up on the list of very annoying things, but they seem like enough to help keep users sticking around a little bit longer and maybe come back a little more often.