Designing at LinkedIn
Hi, I’m Ji Tae, a Senior studying Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Last Summer I had the pleasure of working at LinkedIn as a UX design intern on the feed & content experience team.
During my internship, I primarily focused on improving the follow ecosystem across our platform. Just like Facebook, LinkedIn has two social actions that users can take: to connect or to follow. But currently following is pretty invisible(like quite literally).


Now LinkedIn is pushing the initiative to encourage users to follow in order to improve the quality of content users see on their feed. Members are always frustrated about seeing irrelevant posts on their feed and this is the result of connecting with people for the sake of networking. Naturally their feed becomes full of content from people they don’t necessarily want to see content from.
Most importantly, we want members to engage in the right relationship with people. Although this is a no brainer, you wouldn’t connect to Bill Gates right? But you would be surprised by how many connection requests Bill Gates receives daily. At the end of the day we want members to connect with people that they know personally and follow those who they look up to.
What did I work on?
I participated in a week long user research session, explored designs for a content discovery experience, designed and shipped related articles, brought filters to the follow hub, redesigned the member welcome email, redesigned the follow module for the onboarding experience, and designed t-shirts and stickers for various teams and events at LinkedIn.
What did I enjoy the most?


I happened to intern during SF Design Week and had the chance to go to some awesome design talks with fellow CMU friends. I really recommend going to these events to learn valuable lessons from design leaders and meet designers from all different disciplines. Me and my friends were fortunate to meet a designer from Method at a open house at Moniker Studios. He invited us to the talk at Method and we got to hear design leaders from Opentable, Yahoo, Amazon, and AXA talk about building successful design teams.



Participating in our intern hackathon. Me, Deb, and some engineer+sales interns teamed up to work on an exciting project. It’s always fun working on something totally different from your normal day-to-day work and it was inspiring to see what other interns were capable of creating in such a short turn around time.


Hosting the Design Open House: A recruiting event where interns all around the bay area come to learn about our design culture and openings for design roles. The most exciting part was designing the branding for this with our fellow design interns: Deb, Faith, Anqi, Sara, and Veronica.


Team off sites and intern off sites. I felt like off sites were crucial in building team chemistry and it’s a great chance to get to know your co workers on a more personal level.


Getting to bond with my mentor, Warren and being nominated by my team and my mentor for the UED rockstar award!


What does the design process look like at LinkedIn?
You might wonder what it takes to get an idea to a product that ships. Before I elaborate, I‘d like to emphasize that this process is different for different companies and unique to each team at an organization.
The Brief
First, you’ll receive the project brief from your product manager and start exploring lo-fi iterations of different ideas that you have.
Reviews, Reviews, Reviews
You show early designs at all different types of reviews and will get a better sense of what direction you should focus on. Once you hone into 2–3 designs, you will most likely rely on your intuition to narrow down to one design. But when you are uncertain about the direction, you can also bring it to user research/testing.
User Research
To conduct user research you’ll work with user researchers to prepare clickable prototypes and devise questions to ask the interviewee. The user researcher will recruit members who range from power users to dormant users. The goal of any user research session is to understand if the designs are intuitive and find opportunities to add delight to the overall experience.
While you might think you’ll have a clear idea of which design will perform best, user research will always prove you wrong. This is why I enjoyed user research so much because it proved every time that designers had their own biases about their designs.
Once you compile feedback you create a presentation of user research findings and present it to the design org. We do this to not only inform others about what direction we will push forward, but also to inspire other designers with member stories.
Hi-Fi & Speccing
Based on user feedback you’ll create hi-fidelity mockups and will get to present your designs at various reviews and will go through several iterations until you receive the green light from your engineering and product partners to spec. Speccing a design consists of measuring pixels, font size, colors and etc of each design element and this is sent to engineers who will build it from there.
The Truth
To be honest, some of the stuff you create will not ship but that’s just the nature of working in tech where everything is fast paced and ever changing. As you can see, if you truly believe in the product you are working on you better practice your presentation and negotiation skills.
One thing I also want to emphasize is that nothing you work on is ever final like school projects. Your designs will always be a beta version of what the final product you and the company envision it to be either due to engineering efforts or performance. This nature of creating products that millions of people use entitles responsibility to the designer to take ownership of their work and be in charge of the lifecycle of a product from its birth to its death(but ideally not its death).
Hope this article wasn’t too long and boring. Connect with me on LinkedIn!
