Pinterest has many use cases. Our team used it to collect favorite logos while my ex-girlfriend uses it to collect clothes she wants to buy. Twitter is the same way. Some people send witty tweets to their friends while others use it as an RSS feed for their followers.

This flexibility is amazing but it also confuses new users. So when they ask, "what do you use Pinterest [or Twitter] for?" is it more effective to give many specific examples or one high-level summary of how the product works?

I ask because we're currently developing our on-boarding UX/UI for Branch and believe our product is similarly flexible. A conference might use it for panel discussions or a blogger might use it to solicit feedback on a post.

So would it be more effective to emphasize the high-level summary (i.e. invite-only conversations) or various use cases (e.g. panel discussions, etc.) to new users?

Paul, you are a co-founder of Pinterest.
Josh, you ran on-boarding for Twitter.

Thanks for the anecdotes!

Not to punt on a good question, but we actually took a dual approach. We had a high-level summary (i.e., "Pinterest is an online pinboard") -and- included multiple use cases to highlight the different ways people could use the product.

We were helped, in part, by the invitation system -- especially in the early days. In the outgoing invite messages, existing users often explained to new users how they were using the product. This eased onboarding considerably.

Were you surprised at all by the use cases that Pinterest users came up with or were they fairly predictable?

I know @handles and #hashtags were created by Twitter users, any similar discoveries at Pinterest?

@Paul - that's a really good insight that users actually explained to others how they were using the product.

We had an interesting problem at Twitter, the users who explained to others how they were using it weren't helpful. They said "I tweet about X,Y,Z and get lots of followers". Most people didn't care or want that at all. "I have nothing to say" The big flip we made at Twitter was to talk about the unique content you would see if you were on Twitter and would otherwise miss.