Pinterest Extends In-App Alerts to Get Teens off the App During School Times

Pinterest now has an in-app alert program to promote the removal of apps during school hours to promote better engagement in classes.

Now, Pinterest is expanding its in-app push notifications for teens, aiming to help with screen time management among teens at school. This week, the teens in the U.K. will start getting these new notifications.

As shown in this example, Pinterest’s teen usage prompts are designed to encourage students to reconsider their social media habits, including Pinterest, during school hours.

Encouraging Balanced Use

As per Pinterest:

“In time for the new school year, Pinterest will help British teens in the form of a new in-app test prompt encouraging teens to close the company’s app during school hours and turn off all device notifications.”

This plan can be viewed as the soft approach, yet the aim is to create awareness/establish limits, particularly in learning sessions. These notifications were tested by Pinterest with students in the U. S. and Canada earlier this year.

In just one month, there were more than 1.3 million active participants in the prompt, highlighting the ability to reduce distractions and improve performance in tasks that are school-related but distracting.

Owing to this good news, it was decided to extend the alerts to the U.K. as the second step and then to other regions of the world.

Feedback-Driven Application

Based on the customer feedback, Pinterest has made a small change in presentation for the U.K. market:

“Teens in Canada and the United States welcomed the feature, but said the messages read like they were coming from a parent or a teacher. To give the prompt a peer-to-peer tone, Pinterest updated the language to be more casual and relatable through phrases such as ‘busy being brilliant?’ and ‘take a break’.”

It is unclear how much impact this will have, but in theory, and based on feedback, it should improve engagement with these prompts.

While it may appear to be a small and easily overlooked feature, even encouraging a fraction of Pinterest users to rethink their app usage habits could prove beneficial.

Bottom Line

The notification system on Pinterest will begin to roll out to teens in the UK this week, as the first in a long line of global efforts to make teens put down their phones during classes.