Adding a portfolio feature to LinkedIn

The brief

During this project, we are going to analyze an already existing and highly adopted app & incorporate a new feature into the existing product. The feature we develop will be based on an area of functionality to be explored & compared to user input.

Our work will culminate in a high-fidelity prototype of a native app that reflects our best path forward based on research, iteration, and testing. For apps that have both Android and iOS implementations, you may choose either platform.

🤜🏻🤛🏻 Team mate: Bérangère Lavisse

⏳ Duration of the challenge: 6 days

👤 App chosen: LinkedIn

The feature

Our feature idea is creating a mini portfolio section on your LinkedIn profile, open to any LinkedIn member. We think showcasing tangible outputs of your work, regardless of your industry, is the best way to present and convince recruiters of your skills, yet most people don’t have a portfolio. We want to help people create a simple portfolio on their Linkedin page, that follows a formatted template, that is concise and quick to read for a recruiter.

The process

As you would have understood, 6 days to - apply the Design Thinking Methodology to build a high-fidelity prototype of a brand new feature - is not a huge amount of time… but challenge accepted !

Empathize

Considering the deadline, we started the process with a guerilla research, a quick, low-cost way of learning about & understanding experiences. Therefore, we performed a quick 2-question interview among 3 LinkedIn users to learn about the desirability of the feature:

• How do you currently use LinkedIn ?
• What do you think about the new feature idea ?

Following the 5-why protocol to dig deeper:

• Why ?
• Why ?
• Why ?
• Why ?
• Why ?

Here is a short selection of the recruitee perspective:

“We have become much more aggressive using LinkedIn to find people.”

“I want to use LinkedIn more, especially to be seen as a thought leader.”

“There is no intermediary solution for people who don’t have their own portfolio website.”

In the end, we gathered enough qualitative data to validate the user pain points & we came out with the following key insights:

• There is demand for a portfolio feature, from both the recruitee & the recruiter sides.
• However people would need some hand-holding & education on how to do it (“Learn more”).

It’s now time to run a business research. We looked at 3 companies: Behance, Malt & Adobe Portfolio to understand how they perform making this feature accessible from their community.

Overall, what we see is that this feature is intimidating for 2 main reasons:

• Historically, it has been designed for artists & designers.
• Sometimes, a portfolio is associating with the need of building a website (ex: Adobe Portfolio).

The process itself, to upload the portfolio on the platform, is very simple: you just have to upload an image or a video of your choice. The thing is that, you have to pre-format the media all by yourself before uploading it. In fact, for now, the competitors doesn’t offer the possibility to create your portfolio using a pre-defined template. And when you don’t work in the design industry, it can be very challenging.

Last but not least, we realized at that stage that featuring a portfolio functionality on an App won’t make any sense.

On Malt App for example, when clicking on “create a portfolio”, the app redirects the user on the website where they feature two CTAs: “add an image” & “add a video”.

The current competitors offer on their app confirms the hypothesis that very few people tend to create their portfolio on a mobile, mainly because uploading media from that device is complicated.

Pivot or persevere ? Pivot for sure ! We therefore decided to give up the idea to include that feature on an App but to focus on the desktop device instead

We finished the empathize step by doing a brand research. It was fast as LinkedIn created a dedicated page about it, accessible here.

Define

We refined the problem statement as follow

LinkedIn members who are interested in taking their profile to the next level need a way to demonstrate their professional skillset, achievements and deliverables in a very tangible way because this builds stronger confidence among recruiters than a mere CV.

Ideate

The brainstorming session allowed us to refine the user flow & the different fields to be filled in. The process has been defined as follow:

• Step 1: fill in the form.
• Step 2: preview the project template generated automatically.
• Step 3: publish the project.

We made sure to stick to the current Linkedin graphic chart format so we agreed quickly to use the pop-in format.

Fill in the form

The objective was to list the info required to generate a project overview. Our mantra here? Keep it simple, straight to the point & accessible to every kind of employee, despite the industry.

We agreed that some fields were mandatory & some were not due to potential confidentiality matters, an important aspect raised during the user interviews.

Mandatory fields:

• Project title*
• Start date*
• End date*
• Problem*
• Solution*
• Objective(s)*
• Result(s) & key achievement(s)*
• Media*

Optional fields:

• Company or client name (could be confidential)
• Contributor(s)
• Toolbox
• Image cover
• Tags

We planned to include “Learn more” CTAs, as LinkedIn already does, below the key sections to educate & help the users formulating those info properly.

Last but not least, we agreed that the user could add any type of media such as images, videos, Youtube or Vimeo URL, excel, ppt, pdf, etc… For the simple reason that the process needs to be easy & avoids the users to have to re-format their work before uploading them.

User flow

Project preview

We discussed as well the proper way to structure the info on the project template generated automatically.

The big challenge here was to wedge all the info on a one landscape format page. The template would need to change automatically the disposition of the elements depending of the uploaded format (landscape vs portrait format).

As the user would have the possibility to upload many different medias on the same project, we had to consider a slider format. And as media would be Powerpoint Presentation sometimes, only the first page of the document would be displayed and the viewers would have to click on the “Present” CTA to see the entire media, and could upload it via a “Download” option.

Prototype, test & iterate

The use case is the following: create a portfolio on LinkedIn for the first time.

And the scenario: Victoria is at her place & has an hour to spare to improve her LinkedIn profile. She heard about the new portfolio functionality & wants to take the opportunity to showcase the last project she has been working on.

After processing the low-fi & mid-fi wireframing, we conducted a usability testings among 5 LinkedIn users. The main patterns that came from those were:

• The users struggled to find the Portfolio new functionality available when clicking on the “Add a section” so we considered adding a dedicated “info” block to highlight it.
• The process was not clear for the users in the sense that they need more vision about what’s going to happen so we added a “New to portfolio?” section on the top of the form recaping the 3 steps: fill, preview & publish.
• The objectives & results fields were confusing so we had to reinforce the fact that they go together. If the user fills one objective, he has to fill one associated result. In addition to this, we removed the 2 fields per section to enable the user to add as many objective as he wish to.
• The expected media was not detailed so we added the list.
• On the project preview, some icons were not understood by the users, especially the “Present” one that looked like the youtube logo.
• The toolbox seemed repetitive with the skills section available on the generic profile so we removed it.

And in the end, we came out with the final high-fi prototype below:

Next steps

The next steps would be promoting the sharing of the your portfolio taking into account that today, improving our LinkedIn profile is perceived as a warning.

Indeed, we understood from the user interviews that it could be associated with the desire to look for another job opportunity.

One way to get rid of that obstacle would be to implement a rewarding system for Companies, with badges for example, as Google does for example. The more a Company’s employees talk about you through the Portfolio, the more they get points, and the more they are visible thanks to the LinkedIn algorithm.

They would be a ton of next steps, but if we had to pick another one, it would be the possibility to choose a template theme among a library instead of imposing one.

Thank you for reading my story 🙏🏻, I hope you enjoyed it !