Pinterest: Can first time users understand “Repin” & “Like”? Why should'nt I simply “like” it as a behavioral attribute?

Question

Similar to Twitter, where RT and Favorites are around - which in is an extension as in on Pinterest. But how often people to manage to understand stark differences on "Repin" and "Like" - If I repin does that mean I never liked it - fundamentally if you had a like - It is a like and repin is also a like with a different use case to it.

Pinterest About Section defines- Like: adds the image to your profile's Likes section, doesn't get added to one of your boards. Repin:allows to categorize onto one of your boards and edit the description of the Pin.

It simply means that you have a liking to a Pin its a "LIKE", but your "Repin" also emerges through your liking; call it is "LOVABLE" - and the subtle difference between "Like" and "Repin" is understood only if you had to read-through the Manual section. Naturally, it is not intuitive and you need split-second to think- What am I going to do here? Do I need this on my board or not? and then choose between these two. There seems a disconnect - where your instinct reaction is to just simply "Like" it - whatever the consequence is. The second string is whether you need that to be categorized in your section. How if you need to add a tag to just add it in your section with a text box after chosing "Like" - where you either allow it or disallow it.

Any confusions around, that you may have felt? Is that on Twitter Do you do more of RT or Favorites? (where I prefer as a user to RT a lot against favorites and on Pinterest would always Repin rather Like a lot - Since I do RT and Repin becoz the item is a "Like" invariably - as I been doing before reading the manual of Pinterest as instinctive reaction). Can these be both coupled to do away any split-second confusion? Why should'nt I simply click "Like" and then decide upon the destination on Pinterest?

Answer 1

These attributes in laid back social networking applications have all sorts of made up (re-*) words to make their application special. Retweet, Repin and Rehop (hopflow.com) are the same kind of re-thingies scattered all over the web – all trying to do the same thing: be famous, attract many user and (ultimately) sell their platform to Google, Microsoft or Apple making billions.

From that perspective these new words are business decisions and not UX decisions. From a UX perspective this behavior is bad, initially, but if the social network do get famous and attract lots of users – then they actually added a word to the English language. That can’t be bad – since we all love evolution both on the web and in the language.

Also any user who have stumbled across any social network know what like is, and can distinguish between like and re-* things (warning: opinion). Thus there wouldn’t be any confusion of what re-* does. Users also like to try out new things and see what happens on a casual social network. If it would be a bank – users would be more careful. Repay-button would be left untouched until the user really knew what was going to happen.

Answer 2

In my opinion, social media sites now feel obligated to offer a "retweet"/"repin"/"reblog" (Tumblr)/"share" (Facebook) option to allow for the spread of information, in an age where home videos go viral, and a the number of views of a "viral" video today easily dwarf such statistics from past years (*still trying to find the most viewed YouTube videos per year to support this claim). I am personally a little more bitter about the "Share this on Facebook/Twitter" buttons on every site. When I see those, I have the same opinion as Benny Skogberg conveyed in the previous post - the site is trying to attract other users to their site by using their current audience as a marketing tool. However, I think sites are actually just adding these buttons as a convenience option to their users, since "sharing" is a large part of our social media experience now.

Anyone who has used social media before should understand the concept of "retweeting"/"sharing". The acceptance of this terminology is that same as why we understand "Like". Before Facebook added this, "I like that photo" simply meant that you enjoyed seeing the photo. Now, based on the context of the sentence, people would associate "like" with a physical action. When a site tries to use a different term than "Like" or "Share", it may confuse some users at first, but the word should convey a similar action and it is often supported by the use of iconic imagery (i.e. the retweet button on Twitter).

A bit off topic, but here is an interesting article about our retweeting habits: http://www.research.rutgers.edu/~sofmac/paper/icwsm2011/macskassy-icwsm2011.pdf