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https://www.pinterest.com/
I’m not sure if any of you use Pinterest or have been on Pinterest.
The whole site is based on photos to grab the users attention. The user “follows” boards (folders) that other users create based on the individuals interest. For example I follow and have a knitting board, cooking board and a architectural board. When I’m on Pinterest I’m looking for theses things to try now or use later.
The home page and log in page don’t use images, but once you log in all you see are images and they keep loading as you scroll down. The sizes of the images range from 1KB (profile photos) to 200KB (main photos). The images are used to help the users “pin” the things they are interested in. When a user pins something it is saved in a board of their choosing. After the image is pinned the user can go back later to use it. Each image is directed to it’s main site. If I pin a cooking recipe for garlic chicken and click on the image it’ll take me to a site like “allrecipes.com”.
The website is still navigable without the images because most of them have descriptions, and where the image belongs its the site where it’s origanally from. But without them takes away from why Pinterest is used.
I think the images are very successful , again they are the main point of the site.
Pinterest is a challenging site for talking about images, but in this case it isn’t because they are the primary focus of the site. Can you guess what makes conversations about images on sites like Pinterest?
It is that Pinterest and sites like it implement infinite scrolling. Infinite scrolling is a page loading technique where we see content continuing to load at the bottom of a page as the viewer scrolls further down. The advantage is that images and other content can be loaded a little at a time, so the viewer doesn’t have to wait for an entire page to load. Unfortunately, infinite scrolling can also be demanding on browsers.
When you were exploring the site with the Web Developer toolbar did you experience anything odd while you were gathering information about the images?
I’m impressed at just how navigable Pinterest is with images turned off. It is still quite orderly and there is a good deal of text included that is contextual to the image content. Surprising!
I noticed that while I was scrolling with the image file size on that it took awhile for the file size to load. Also when disabled the images some of the text was out of order. I was very surprised too that I could still use Pinterest without the images.