Pinterest's VP of Tech Outlines Its Evolving Efforts To Maximize Inclusion and Cater To All Users
Jeremy King is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Pinterest and was formerly the Chief Technology Officer at Walmart for eight years. You can follow Jeremy on Twitter. He provided an overview of the platform's efforts to maximize inclusivity while also outlining its future plans on this element.
"We believe it's our responsibility as a visual platform to think about what it means to really see yourself in the product, regardless of who you are. One of the biggest accomplishments in our diversification work over the past few years has been in diversifying the data and training the models with diverse content. Through this work, we can serve more diverse recommendations, which has led to increases in engagement and searches. We've also integrated skin tone ranges with our Try On product, which has brought an augmented reality layer to our platform. With AR Try On with skin tone ranges, we found Pinners are 5x more likely to show purchase intent on Pins with AR than standard Pins. And AR is a better product because it allows for diverse searching and filtering. We're continuing to bring inclusivity to these key products. Building for diversity and representation isn't just the right thing to do, it's the best thing for our global business. Pinterest has always been a platform for positivity, inspiration and relevance. To help people feel inspired, we need to deliberately engineer the technology in a way that advances that positivity. Our most recent example is our ban of weight loss ads, a first for the industry." |