Everyday UI: LinkedIn Web Application
LinkedIn serves as a professional networking site, connecting experts, job recruiters, and job seekers. It is my belief that their user interface should be clean and professional to reflect the values of the brand.
We will first begin with what LinkedIn does well. The menu bar at the top allows easy access to all the functionality that the site is capable of. This design is common with many websites in social media, shopping, and portfolios, and allows the user a sort of “home base” to return to at any point. The arrangement is also similar to Facebook, which can be both a detriment and benefit to the site. It can serve as a benefit, because if a user has never used LinkedIn before, but has used sites like Facebook, then they will feel more comfortable using the site because it is more familiar to them. However, this also takes away from the original mission and goals of LinkedIn. The site becomes crowded with ads, trending topics, and discussion threads that seem nearly endless. Overall, the site becomes messy and overcrowded with visual information.
If we continue, and break this design down into its usability principles, and we can examine the learnability, memorability, efficiency, and affordances. In terms of learnability, LinkedIn’s similarity to Facebook and other social media sites does make it mostly easy to learn. However, when it comes to fine-tuning a profile or running a discussion, figuring out how to do simple tasks can become extremely difficult to learn. For occasional users, the story does not get much better. Simple tasks like editing experience or messaging a connection are easy to remember, but more niche tasks sometimes require further research into the exact methodology needed to complete them because they are too complex to remember. Not only does the memorability suffer in more complex tasks, but even for extremely experienced users, the efficiency of the different complex tasks can be difficult to do when bogged down by extraneous steps and a crowded interface that is often too similar to social media and serves less of LinkedIn’s original purpose.
For instance, when someone wants to connect with another person, they can send a network request to that person. This request will get sent to that person’s page with all the other people that want to connect with them in a list. To accept a request, they would click the check marked “Accept Request” button next to the original person’s image. This is a simple straightforward process, but after that is complete, it gets messy. A little window pops up in the bottom of the screen and recommends other people they may want to consider connecting with based off of the connection that they just confirmed. While in concept this is a fun way to make more connections, in reality, the pop up distracts from the original purpose. LinkedIn networks were made to be carefully cultivated groups of people that a user has and will continue to professionally interact with. LinkedIn should be that tool, not just a way to add a bunch of random people that are vaguely connected to someone a user does know.
There are a few concrete ways to improve this design to make it more professional while still maintaining the learnability provided by its similarity to social media sites. The first is to simply clean up the homepage. Right now the central column should be the primary focus, but it is currently being swallowed up and overwhelmed by all the other ads and trending topics around it. We can take these out and replace them with small sections dedicated to notifications or waiting LinkedIn notifications. We can also replace connection recommendations with other ideas. For instance, if someone is working within a certain field, it can recommend certain job postings or just companies to look into or follow. Prompting users to engage with topics and companies to show up in their homepage feed will help the site be its more professional and less social self.