Pinterest

PROJECT OVERVIEW

As a growth designer on the conversions team, I drove strategic growth through innovative conversion strategies and well-crafted upsell designs. Our team focused on increasing login and sign-up rates while creating quality user experiences that improve engagement and comprehension.

This project aimed to help logged-out users understand the benefits of Pinterest's “Save” feature by allowing them to save a limited number of ideas and access them later with an account. This allowed users to experience the feature's value before converting.

ROLE

Product designer

SUCCESS METRICS

Increase # of saves and retention

DESIGN QUESTION

How might we help logged-out users better understand the benefits of “Save” while increasing engagment and maintaining conversions?

THE SOLUTION

A simple yet effective ‘learn while doing’ delayed upsell approach

THE PROBLEM

The team previously prioritized driving conversions over retention and engagement by gating the save feature behind an upsell. This approach increased logins and sign-ups but didn’t help logged-out users understand the tangible benefits of saving on Pinterest. In this project, we traded short-term conversion loss for longer-term benefits of improved comprehension, retention, and quality conversions.

DESIGN STRATEGY

My objective was to increase engagement and comprehension of the save feature while maintaining conversions. I didn’t want to completely remove the upsell, as that would significantly drop our conversion metrics. Instead, I designed a delayed upsell experience with the value proposition of “save now, try later” to generate excitement around collecting ideas. The design goal was to entice users to save immediately and reward them post-conversion with the ability to view and keep all their saved ideas.

I made minimal changes to the control design and mapped each design change to a hypothesis to ensure we could accurately measure and understand the impact. Making too many changes at once would make it difficult to understand the cause of metric losses or gains.

Research questions:

• Will users click the save button more often if we allow them to save a Pin?

• Will this lead to a better experience? (measured by session duration and engagement)

• How many times should we allow users to save before triggering an upsell?

Experiment plan

We tested four variants, each measuring the incremental impact of allowing users to save while logged out. Their ideas were saved to a temporary profile that could be accessed during their session. Once users converted, their ideas would be permanently saved to their Pinterest profile.

Our goal was to determine the number of saves that would maximize engagement, comprehension, and quality conversions.

• Variant A: Upsell triggered on 2nd save attempt

• Variant B: Upsell triggered on 3rd save attempt

• Variant C: Upsell triggered on 4th save attempt

• Variant D: Upsell triggered on 5th save attempt

RESULTS

This experiment was a huge success 🎉! We saw a 16% increase in clicks on the save button, a 72% increase in clicks on the profile icon, a 246% increase in clicks on the sign up button on the temporary profile page, and a 196% increase in conversions.

We shipped variant B as it had the greatest incremental return on engagement and conversions.

FINAL DESIGN