"i love this site!" vs. "it's a little girly": Perceptions of and Initial User Experience with Pinterest

Hannah Miller, Shuo Chang, Loren Terveen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Pinterest is a popular social networking site that lets people discover, collect, and share pictures of items from the Web. Among popular social media sites, Pinterest has by far the most skewed gender distribution: women are four times more likely than men to use it. To better understand this, we examined two factors that generally affect whether people try a social site and whether they continue using it: The external perception of a site (e.g., as conveyed in popular media) and the site's initial user experience. For the latter, we focused on the role of social bootstrapping, importing contacts from one social site to another. We conducted a survey study, finding that: perceptions of Pinterest among users and non-users of the site differed significantly; trying Pinterest led to substantial changes in user perceptions of the site; social bootstrapping affected users' initial impression of Pinterest, generally improving it for women and harming it for men. We present implications of our findings for design and research.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1728-1740
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450329224
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 28 2015
Event18th ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2015 - BC, Canada
Duration: Mar 14 2015Mar 18 2015

Publication series

NameCSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

Other

Other18th ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2015
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityBC
Period3/14/153/18/15

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 ACM.

Keywords

  • Pinterest
  • gender
  • perception
  • social bootstrapping
  • social media
  • social networks

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