Pinterest Basket
Pinterest lets you save to a board. Baskets lets you save before you know which one.
PROJECT DETAILS
DURATION
6 weeks (2026)
TEAM
Riya (me!)
PROJECT
Feature addition
AI assistance
ROLE/SKILLS
End to End Product Design
Prototyping
Interaction Design
Overview
As part of an assignment at Parsons I analyzed the Pinterest desktop on ways to improve user experience.
What is Basket?
Baskets is a low-pressure holding space designed for that in-between moment. A place to gather freely before committing anything to a board.
Problem
Users find organizing pins overwhelming
Goal
Design for how people actually think: non-linear, intuitive, & often unfinished.
RESEARCH
Initial research to find
how users curate using Pinterest
I carried out user interview with users having backgrounds ranging from psychology, design and architecture with varying level of use with the platform. And due to limited amount of time I decided to scope the project to just the desktop version of the platform.
Here are the top 3 comments that kept showing up:
Search doesn't match how users think
Users struggle to find content through search as it doesn't support the visual and contextual ways they naturally recall and look for pins.
Hard to organize/maintain boards
Users struggle to maintain and organize their board system, leading many to abandon boards altogether.
Ads are ruining experience
Users struggle to distinguish ads from real posts, making the experience feel cluttered and distracting rather than inspiring.
Although framed differently at its core the users were bothered by the same thing.
So the goal became to design for how people actually think: non-linear, intuitive, & often unfinished.
EXPLORATION
Iterations to match the most intuitive solution
I began with open exploration across three key questions:
How do other applications organize data and files in a way that feels manageable?
How can I make the organizing experience more efficient?
How do people naturally categorize information, and how can the design reflect that?
To move fast and learn early, I kept designs intentionally low fidelity and brought them into user testing as quickly as possible.
Testing with users and looking at the majority of votes led the final verdict to be Bins which was later changed to Baskets!
Basket is inspired by how you work
Humans collect things before making sense of them. Basket goes back to the natural way people collect things. Dump everything at one place then make sense later.
With an aim to keep that tactile feel, basket lets users drag and drop items into it and allows users to sort through them later.
Basket lets you focus on what is important to you
Rather than forcing immediate structure, Baskets embraces ambiguity. It lets users gather freely, then step back and make sense of what they've collected.
It contains 3 main features:
Pin to Board
AI organize
To support this transition, the feature integrates AI in a way that feels assistive, not directive.
It suggests relevant boards based on patterns in saved pins, or creates new ones when needed.
Importantly, this system is optional, users can organize everything manually, maintaining full control over their process.
Download Pins
Baskets turns a rigid action into a fluid workflow, making curation feel less like sorting and more like discovering intent over time.
CONCLUSION
Impact
This project was presented in front of 20+ people and was recognized as something they would definitely use and be benefited by, with quotes stating "I like how physical and tactile the drag and drop action feels and matches how I think when saving anything".
