Create Flow Pin Builder

Create Flow Pin Builder unifies the tasks of creating and promoting Pins.
My role
My role included vision, design, content, and user resesrch.
Collaborators
I partnered with a product manager, a team of engineers, and a legal consultant.
Timeline
2021

User problem

Pinterest advertisers faced significant friction when creating new ad campaigns due to a disconnected Pin creation process. Data highlighted the severity of this issue:

  • 40% of advertisers hit error messages by trying to launch campaigns without selecting Pins
  • 52% of those advertisers abandoned their campaigns after encountering these errors
  • In just one month, this resulted in 4,265 lost revenue-driving campaigns
  • Advertisers had to constantly switch between campaign creation and Pin Builder flows, disrupting their workflow and often losing progress
Creating a campaign & new Pins (before).

Solution at a glance

I developed the Create Flow Pin Builder concept and collaborated with my team to bring it to life. The integrated Pin creation experience within the campaign flow includes:

  • A side sheet component that keeps advertisers in their campaign creation context while creating Pins
  • Advanced Pin creation capabilities (multiple Pins, different formats, product tagging)
  • Automatic Pin selection after creation to prevent launch errors
  • Streamlined publishing options for boards
  • Visual improvements like clearer selected states and better organized modules

This approach required collaboration with systems designers to create a new side sheet component for Pinterest's design system, which later became a standard pattern for handling subtasks across Ads Manager.

Creating a Pin with Create Flow Pin Builder

Impact

After 8 weeks of experimentation, the results showed significant improvements:

  • 15.3% increase in Pin creation within campaign flows
  • 14.1% decrease in campaign launch failures
  • 4.51% increase in self-service campaign creation
  • Increased spending propensity across all advertiser segments
  • Reduced time in creation flow
  • The side sheet component became a reusable pattern for other advertising tasks

The solution not only solved the immediate Pin creation challenges but also established new design patterns that improved the broader advertising experience on Pinterest.