Gestalt 2022
Year in Review
It’s that time again. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting longer and people are sending out unsolicited updates on what they did this year. Everybody’s doing it, and, hey, who are we to buck tradition?
The Gestalt team had lofty ambitions and even loftier hopes for 2022. We said “this is the year” many times and—spoiler alert—it was!
2022 has exceeded our expectations. Read on for a short and sweet summary of our biggest moments building Pinterest’s design foundations.
What's up, docs?
Documentation got tons of attention in 2021, and we doubled down this year. The biggest highlight of 2022 was the complete redesign of our site, not for funsies, but to expand its content. The site is lookin’ sharper than ever and has a whole library of foundational guidelines, a revamped icon library viewer, and brand-spankin’ new component guidelines for Android and iOS.
What has this work led to? Well, a whole lot more traffic. 192% unique users, 178% sessions and 150% page views. Higher satisfaction too: 86% overall docs satisfaction (46% giving the highest marks) and 73% of designers saying they view our docs at least weekly—that’s up 59 from the first half of 2020!
192%
Users who visited our docs compared to 2021
73%
Designers using docs weekly (or more!)
Components + tokens
Gestalt shipped 38 component additions and updates this year, including some game-changers like the new SideNavigation and our big PageHeader overhaul.
2022 saw a 11% bump in overall use of Gestalt instances in the Pinterest Web codebase. We were most excited to see a 28% increase in our more complex components (think something like SlimBanner as opposed to Text).
We added 3 new token families to Gestalt: data visualization colors, elevation and opacity. We revamped our type treatments on the Web platform across the entire product. Our proudest achievement here? Shipping a tokenized dark mode for mobile web in just four engineering days. You know, no big deal...just kidding, it’s a very big deal!
We made 12 accessibility improvements to Gestalt because we take the abbreviation A11Y literally. These improvements included more accessible error messages in our form fields, a more semantic-friendly Image and an accessibility-friendly RadioGroup component. 12 may not seem like an impressive number, so here’s a bigger one: 2,000. That’s roughly the number of improvements our Gestalt accessibility updates made in product.
Speaking of in-product improvements, we found the time to replace legacy custom components with Gestalt equivalents. This work improved overall product consistency and gave us permission to remove 8,342 lines in our Web codebase that didn’t “spark joy.” Don’t worry, we donated them to some engineers in need...
28%
Increase in complex Gestalt component instances
~2k
In-product accessibility enhancements
8,342
Lines of code removed due to Gestalt adoption
Extreme makeover:
Figma edition
You’ve seen our engineering achievements, but what about design? 2022 was our love letter to the amazing Pinterest designers—starting with our Figma libraries. And oof, they really needed work! If we told you everything we did, we’d be here until 2023! So here are some of our faves:
We completely restructured and simplified all our libraries. We used Figma’s new component properties to cut 500 total variants. Dark mode variants were added to all mobile components and we shipped a complete redesign of our Pin component. Pin is literally in our company name, so it was really important for us to get that one right.
The results? Massive. Specifically, 1.92 million inserts in these past 12 months. The detaches? Paltry. Specifically, 0.56% of all inserts. The feedback? Rad. A 86% satisfaction from designers, which is a hefty 21% bump from the last year.
We also saw a Gestalt Figma component adoption high of 45% this year which was roughly a 15% improvement from when we started tracking in Q2. How can we measure adoption rates of Figma components? Because we built the ability to track adoption of our components within designs in near real time! Yes, it’s very exciting. Yes, it changes everything. And yes, we will be talking much more about this in 2023.
1.92M
Total Gestalt Figma component insert
0.56%
Component detach rate
45%
Peak design adoption rate
Design Systems Day-um!
File this under “things that make the Gestalt team awesome:” our first conference, Design Systems Day. And while we know design systems programming can fill more than one day, it was one heck of a day! We hosted 6 sessions, which included 8 external speakers from Meta, Procter & Gamble and Spotify alongside some of our Pinterest colleagues. 90 people attended the conference, which ain’t too shabby for our first time out the gate.
We’re already making plans for our second Design Systems Day in 2023 because 88% of attendees told us that they gained helpful information to improve Pinterest product quality—well worth a day (or five) in our book.
88%
Attendees responded the conference helped them learn how to improve product quality
90
Total conference attendees
Impeccable vibes
We saved customer feedback for last to end this post (and 2022) with a bang! Our core engineering customers gave us a 96% overall satisfaction rating (+2% from last year) with 70% of giving us highest marks (+13% from last year). And design? We saw a 95% overall satisfaction rating (+33% from last year) with 23% of giving us perfect scores (+12% from last year)!
90% of product designers responded that Gestalt speeds up their workflow with 35% giving highest marks. And if that isn’t impressive enough, 100% of engineers in our core customer base responded that Gestalt speeds up their workflow (with 66% giving us perfect scores). Even when it seems like no one can agree on anything, all of us can agree that Gestalt helps us work faster.
95.5%
Design sentiment compared to the second half of 2021—a “paltry” 32 point increase!
100%
Engineers in our core customer base responded that Gestalt speeds up their workflow
This was the year
At times, this year has been exhausting and hard. But what our small but mighty team has accomplished is a huge achievement! Years from now, when we look back at the history of Gestalt and relish how it’s finally everything we ever wanted it to be, we’ll pinpoint 2022 as the turning point. Now we’re going to celebrate and ride this high into 2023 so we can work some serious, high-level design systems magic. Stay tuned, stay frosty, stay excellent—we’ll see you next year!