As a new grad student who is eager to extend the professional networking on LinkedIn, I encountered frustrations when using LinkedIn mobile app. I challenged myself to redesign LinkedIn’s interface to optimize the professional networking experience within one week.
With that said, I understand that this is a redesign without access to actual user data, success metrics, the entire business context and ration behind design decisions; and as an individual designer I have the luxury of working in a “perfect world” without constraints. This project was done before I attending UT iSchool. The intention of this side project is just to challenge my product thinking and interaction design skills on a product I admire and use frequently.
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Team
Individual Project
My Role
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UX/UI Designer
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User Research
Timeline
June 2020, One week
Tools
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Figma
Problem Statement
How might we redesign LinkedIn interface to optimize the professional networking experience?
Approach
I started this project with many assumptions around things matter to users the most. To challenge these assumptions and discover new insights, I took a step back to look at the mindset and values of professional networking users.
I defined a list of questions and interviewed 4 frequent users of LinkedIn application. These interviews helped me to uncover a key problem to solve for this redesign challenge.
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Pain Point
80% of LinkedIn app users have problems to find their posts, saved articles, and documents quickly.
The anatomy of the problem and solutions
Inefficient Information Architecture on the Profile Page
Ambiguity in finding posts, saved information, and documents were found from user testing. Inefficient way to present information causes LinkedIn users can not find where their posts and documents are saved for their later access. On average, users spent more than 30 seconds on their profile page and couldn't find their past posts and documents.
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This problems can easily dissuade users to have more activities on LinkedIn.
On the other hand, users on the professional platform usually prefer to be more conservative, so this ambiguity might force them to be more a non active user.
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Based on my finding from user testing, I decided to redesign the profile page.
BEFORE
AFTER
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Going to LinkedIn profile page
BEFORE
AFTER
Categorizing the hierarchy of information
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
Reflection
As a UX designer, I constantly look at design as the best practices to evaluate user experience of digital products. This project is a hands-on practice to translate my idea into redesign. Given the scope of the project, limited resources and time to do a proper user research, I framed this project to optimize user experience within LinkedIn's existing functionalities. However, if I want to develop this project in future, I will concentrate more on the following issue:
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User Testing: I realized that those 4 user interviews are insufficient to understand different customer segments, though they were useful to reveal insights to improve current UX.