As a mobile-first company, a big focus is designing and engineering for the 80 percent of Pinners who access Pinterest on a mobile device. The small team of cross-platform mobile engineers recently spoke at a Discover Pinterest event. Wendy Lu and Carl Rice presented their work on improving a Pinner’s initial experience on iOS and the overall experience on Android. We also invited Google Product Director Luke Wroblewski to talk about working in a mobile-forward world with a focus on designing apps for various screen sizes. Here’s a recap of the presentations below, and we’ve posted a video of the event on our YouTube channel.
Screen time (Luke Wroblewski)
Currently a product director at Google, Luke is a serial entrepreneur who led his two startups, Polar and Bagcheck, to acquisitions by Google and Twitter. In his talk, he discusses screen time, a concept that’s come a long way from its initial definition of how long we could sit in front of a TV. Today, people move between and simultaneously use screens of various sizes, proportions and quality throughout the day. Luke hones in on ways engineers and designers compensate for the intricacies of each device, modifying UI designs using RESS techniques, vertical media queries and more.
Rebuilding new user education on mobile (Wendy Lu)
Wendy joined Pinterest in early 2013 as a part-time engineer while she finished her undergraduate degree in computer science at Stanford University. Since joining full-time after graduation, she’s focused on iOS engineering, and has worked on the iOS7 redesign, our launch in the Japan, the ‘News’ feature, buyable Pins and more. In her presentation, she discusses building a dynamic new user experience that performs significantly better than previous experiences across all engagement metrics, and the cross-platform system that supports it.
Optimizing the Pinner’s Android experience (Carl Rice)
Carl’s experience in mobile engineering spans Android and iOS on both mobile apps and tablets. At Pinterest, he’s focused on Android development, and played a big part in the initial app release in 2012, and throughout all app updates. For this event, Carl talked about the development and redesign of our Android app to create a better experience for Pinners, including optimizing content layout, streamlining common flows and catering to different devices.
Evrhet Milam is an engineering manager at Pinterest.
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