Pinterest Revamps 'Pin It' Button, Makes Bookmarking Faster

Since its launch five years ago, Pinterest has been a destination for dreaming about the future. But Pinterest wants to be much more than the place to discover clothes, vacations, articles and recipes. In a redesign of its “Pin It” browser button, rolled out on Thursday, the site cut the number of clicks required to pin items on desktops in half.
Pinterest product manager Cesar Isern said in an interview that the rollout is the biggest revamp to the Pin It button in years. Making a pin now requires two clicks on desktops, down from four, and it’s easier to create and find boards. The San Francisco-based firm raised $367 million earlier this year, giving the site a valuation of $11 billion. The change is part of a larger effort by Pinterest to make it easier to save content, and ultimately, go back to it.
“A small change like this definitely has a big effect,” said lead Pinterest product designer Albert Pereta in an interview. “Once you make pinning and saving faster, people start creating more boards, they start to follow more people, they get better content because it makes the whole process seamless.”

The social network won’t speak to speculation that the service might launch a buy button sometime this year, said spokesperson Malorie Lucich. However, the company has said repeatedly that it wants to make pins more actionable. Following that theme, last month, the social network made it possible to install iOS apps from Apple AAPL +0.85%’s App Store directly from Pinterest through a service called App Pins.
“At Pinterest, we are focusing more and more on bridging the gap between discovery, save and do,” said Isern. “What we are seeing is the reason people save that content is the motivation… to act upon that content.”
 

In December, eMarketer predicted that global web sales in 2015 would increase nearly 21% from 2014 to about $1.59 trillion, and there is little doubt that Pinterest wants to become a bigger e-commerce player. About 80% of all pinning currently occurs on mobile, but about half of original pinning is done on desktop, said Isern. To date, 50 billion Pins have been made on Pinterest, saved onto more than 1 billion boards, said Lucich.

The update to the Pin It button came out of Pinterest’s “Save” team, which it grew out of its 2014 acquisition of Icebergs, a visual organization startup. Later this month, Pinterest will probably deliver more “features and products” to enable action on the platform, said Isern.