Don’t make people think! Wait, I can save, but where do they go? I can write articles, but how can I access them?

UX recommendations to improve the connected experience and engagement on LinkedIn

I’ve been a LinkedIn user from I believe around 2007, or around the time it first came out. As such, I have alternated between being a free and a paying customer for 16 years! Over the years, I’ve seen LinkedIn grow to be the accepted and de facto business networking tool. As a UX expert and growth driver, I have also been keenly aware of areas that they could improve to deepen people’s commitment and increase the amount of time they spend consuming content, interacting with posts, making connections:

• Make the action to save posts more salient. Currently, it’s hidden in a … ellipses button. It’s become quite common for people to post many-page works up now, which we don’t generally want to try to consume on a mobile phone or may not have time to do right then, but don’t want to lose the content. I have lost so much interesting content that way! Bringing the Save post icon (just a bookmark icon) to the post level, along with Like, would ensure that people can easily save and access saved content.
• Make it much easier to save content. This is something I’ve wondered about for years, and just finally found the answer to today. Your saved content link only seems to be visible when you are browsing a feed. It’s also not very salient with a gray icon. Generally bookmark icons are red, to pre-attentively call attention to themselves. Bring it into the Profile section and include it as a drop-down option in the Profile drop-down. Or make it even more salient and add a top task bar item for it. These are two places I would expect to see it.

I’d better click View all quickly so that I don’t lose this content. Where on earth do they put saved content?

Hmm. I’d expect to see it in my Profile drop-down or on my Profile itself, but to no avail.

Let’s play a treasure hunt! Can YOU find where to access posts that you save?

Well, I’ll just unsave it and hope that the feed doesn’t update so that I can resave it, then go to View all on the notification.

• Remind me that I have saved content. We’re always on the go and checking LinkedIn during bursts of time, such as during a break at work. Our brains have limited cognitive capacity, even more so when multitasking, so any reminders of tasks that we’ve started (saving something to read later) will increase our likelihood of actually reading it. Cognitive psychology principles tell us that as humans, we are more likely to complete a task that we have started than to start one that we haven’t.
• Increase the value of my feed. I belong to a huge number of groups that I’ve joined over the years, and have always been surprised that that group content does not show up in our feed. Again, we are on the go and are unlikely to try to find a group to see if it’s got any valuable content. Bringing this forth to the feed would increase awareness of this content, increase interactions, foster deeper connections, and inspire users to create more content for their groups.
• The idea of adding content to groups is great, but if you’re a long-time LinkedIn user, you likely have a lot of groups that you don’t really interact with (for me, it is literally all of them, due to the afore-mentioned lack of easy discoverability), so telling me that I can share my post with another group when I don’t know anything about the group at this point makes me unlikely to do so. Also, there’s an opportunity to build my trust and interaction with the group by surfacing the number of users, posts, and most recent post.
• There are a lot of groups that are largely defunct, and there’s no way of knowing that unless you go into each group. Bring that information forward. Make it easier to leave a group.
• After 25 years in industry and three careers (tech writing, QA testing, and UX), I’ve amassed a ton of skills. This also reflects the evolving expectations of the industry, as UX in particular has moved from traditional UX to visual design, animation design, coding, data analytics, growth, accessibility, and business strategy, to name a few. Limiting us to 50 skills has never made sense, especially because over the years, we’ve had people recommend us for skills, so are loathe to remove those skills, even if they’re not the skills we’re currently focusing on.
• Make it easy for me to see what content I’ve added to LinkedIn. I’ve posted a few articles on LinkedIn, but am a prolific poster on Medium. When I recently tried to add a few articles, I was very confused by the newsletter call-to-action. It left me with questions: “Am I creating a newsletter? All I want to do is create an article!” and uncertainty, “I don’t think I have enough content for a newsletter. I’ve never made a newsletter before. What are examples of newsletters? Doesn’t it sound kind of prideful on my part to assume that people might be interested in a newsletter from me?
• Preview article post content. I put up 4 articles on systems analysis and project management in the past few months, and I got some likes, but because all they could see was the title, I am skeptical that people even opened it. This is in contrast to Medium, where I can easily see my followers and experience the wins of gaining more followers, getting claps on my articles, and best of all, getting articles picked up by online publications to expand my readership. I also can’t see any real stats on my articles, so I don’t know what’s resonating with people, how far they read in an article, whether they liked it.

This is not easy to find. The more active I am, the harder it will be to find this information.

• Many of us self-publish nowadays on Medium or LinkedIn. I’ve always thought of Publications as official, such as my article in Towards Data Science, but as a technical writer, I’ve got many software installation guides with my name in the byline as well! Many of these self-published articles people are putting out have excellent, well-researched information in them, so you can assuage people’s uncertainty by making Medium and LinkedIn drop-down options for the Publisher field.
• Add a checkbox to automatically add a LinkedIn article to your Publications area on your Profile. Better yet, add an integration (as mentioned below) to allow people to automatically send LinkedIn content to Medium and vice versa, with the checkbox to automatically add it to your Publications section.
• Add a link to Medium to the Profile information. Yes, it’s a competitor, but your article publishing is still not on par with their platform yet. For prolific writers, it will raise awareness across our network of the things we’re learning, applying, and thinking about. For example, I have 43 articles on Medium and more in the works. It doesn’t make sense for me to post all of these individually to LinkedIn, which brings me to my next growth driver.
• Add a data integration to allow users to sync content from Medium to LinkedIn. This will vastly increase the number of users that are posting on LinkedIn and will build the value of your platform. Enable them to encourage their followers to follow them on LinkedIn as well. For example, in my Medium profile, I have a “Connect with me on LinkedIn link”, but imagine an integrated experience where there was a LinkedIn icon directly on Medium.
• Make it easier to disconnect from someone or to block someone. Having to go to the person’s profile to do so enables the person to see that you’ve been there. When someone makes a decision to do either of these, they want to be anonymous. I had to look up on Google on how to block people, because it is not the … ellipses icon on the person’s profile.

Okay, LinkedIn team! I love your platform and your service, but that’s all you get for free! I’ve applied to your company, so hire me for more great ideas to improve the connectedness of the user experience and drive growth and engagement!