Published in · 4 min read · Feb 21, 2024
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Ah, Pinterest. Home of my childhood (and possibly adulthood) wedding planning and 2011 outfit inspiration. Pinterest was a haven for the quirky girls among us, and was the original online forum for the mood board. Pinterest still has a pretty large global user base, but user growth has dropped to 2%, and anecdotally, I’m not hearing many Designers hyping it up. Yet that, my friends, is exactly what I am here to do. I truly believe that Pinterest is still the ideal tool for creating a mood board, in this, the year of our Lord 2024.
In the last 10 years, as digital design has become ubiquitous, a slough of tools has been released to assist Designers and teams in the creative process. Milanote, Miro, FigJam, and the like, all aim to streamline the brainstorming process. And though these tools offer more visually compelling solutions for mood board creation (seeing as you can’t really format a Pinterest board), from a practicality perspective, you really can’t beat Pinterest.
Why Pinterest?
Pinterest is by no means a perfect application. There are many tweaks I’d make the the UI if I was given the chance. But Pinterest does do what it sets out to do incredibly well: it is a place to collect ideas and visuals into boards. The beauty of Pinterest as a mood boarding tool, is that it’s not merely visual. Almost every pin has a link attached, and though the creator of the pin gets to choose a cover image, it’s easy to access the entire site or resource by clicking into it.
Especially for UX designers, being able to see more than just an image is a huge asset. I might love an aspect of an application’s interaction design, but an image can only capture the visual elements of the UI. Having an easily accessible link means that any time I want to use that application as inspiration, I can actually interact with it. I can feel what it feels like to navigate through the site, try creating something with the tools, and tangibly bring myself back to what inspired me about the app in the first place.
One of the big pitfalls I’ve seen in interface design recently is the emphasis on a beautiful UI, without an equally beautiful interactive experience. No matter how pretty and sleek a site or app looks, if it is clunky and awkward to work with, users will suffer, and your company’s profits will suffer too. As a User Experience designer, my priority when moodboarding is not only to collect assets and inspiration that are nice to look at, but are also inspirational because of their UX.
The Save Extension
After reading all of that praise, you may be thinking: “that is great, but there are other tools that let you put links in your mood board.” And, you would be right. So what elevates Pinterest above Milanote (my second favorite mood board tool) and its companions? Most design tools stand alone, and you have to download a PC app to be able to access the full functionality. They work great by themselves, but they don’t necessarily play well with others, or if they do, you’ll have to pay for that more robust functionality.
Pinterest is native to the web, works on any browser, and is easily accessible and usable on PC, mobile, or tablet. And if you are in the 71% of people using Chrome, Firefox, or Edge, you can add the magical Pinterest Save Extension to your browser. This ol’ girl will let you select any image on any site as a pin easily, without leaving that webpage at all. It will even aggregate all the images from that page for you, so you can pick your favorite to be the cover image.
If I liked the above graphic from the Salesforce website, for example, I could hover over it, and BAM, there’s the Pinterest save button, where I can save it to any of my boards without ever leaving Salesforce’s site. This is a small feature, yes, but over hours spent moodboarding, it saves a lot of time, saving of images, and copy/pasting. The save extension is a great example of a small feature that elevates the UX of Pinterest and makes it a mainstay for me over other mood inspiration collecting apps.
Wait, even for client presentations?
Okay, fair enough. You make an excellent point, a link to a Pinterest board is probably not what a client wants to see when you are presenting graphic design concepts or branding ideas. But clients are hardly the only stakeholders who interface with mood boards. Designers, Product Managers, and even Front-End Developers can utilize a mood board (especially an interactive one) in their process. For a me as a UX designer, making mood boards for internal use and personal inspiration, I haven’t found something I like more than Pinterest.
Make of all that what you will. Maybe you hate that it takes 3 whole clicks to delete a pin from a board (I certainly do). Maybe you think I am just making a controversial point, or that I was sponsored by Pinterest to drum up returning users (I promise, my love for Pinterest is entirely unsponsored). But I am going to keep using Pinterest to make UX mood boards until I find another tool that can so elegantly and quickly collect interactive design inspiration. So far, Pinterest is still on top.
