Personal Background

Many of the top colleges provide their students with numerous opportunities for growth and development especially when it comes to students interested in working in the technology sector. Despite this, many people are unable to take advantage of these opportunities and are left on their own in finding opportunities for growth both in their skills as well as their network.

For a course project. My team and I wanted to focus on a redesign of LinkedIn for Android Devices.

Who our users are: Someone who is in or aspiring to be in the technology industry

The tech sector is one of the most rapidly growing industries in the US, employing nearly 12 million people in total, with roughly 261,000 jobs added in the last year. We gathered our research on the UCSD campus. UCSD has a reputation and demographic of people who pursue both academia and industry careers. We have access to people who are looking for internships, full time jobs that range from User Design to Data Science to software engineering and more. We were able to empathize with the users for we as individuals are entering the workforce as well. We feel that while UCSD and other universities provide opportunities for student development, many people who don’t have access to these opportunities have a disadvantage when competing for jobs.

Research Goals

1. To understand why people download LinkedIn and how long they stay on the app each time they log into it  

2. To understand how people use LinkedIn in order to help with their professional network that they can use for their career

Research and Need Finding

Direct Observation: Our goal was to know what were the ways people find information on LinkedIn that were different from how they explain the way of finding information and what information, if available to the user, was most often employed or acted upon. We asked our participants to: scroll through their news feed, add a connection, find an event on LinkedIn and then find an event on another app to their preference. Throughout these tasks, we screen recorded their actions on linked and then asked them to think aloud with what they are doing and why.

Interviews: This method gave us more of an understanding on why people download LinkedIn and what prevents them from deleting the app. Understanding how people use LinkedIn and what they think of LinkedIn is important because we want to know what are ways LinkedIn can have more active users. At the end of the direct observation we asked if our participants could answer a few follow up questions. We asked how they interact with their connections and why they use their newsfeed for. Along with this, we also asked what brought them to making a LinkedIn account, how long they have had a LinkedIn account and how often they use LinkedIn in week or month, how long they stay on the app when opening it, and what other social applications they use and follow questions for users to elaborate. Responses were documented both through notes as well as audio recordings.

here are the screen recordings we took during the direct observations, the first screen shows the task of a user trying to find events on LinkedIn. The second screen shows the task of the user finding someone to connect with.

Major Findings

All LinkedIn participants could not find meet up opportunities to attend for career growth 

A Minority LinkedIn participants actively interact with connections to build their personal network 

All LinkedIn participants want more personalized career-building information and did not utilize the hashtag filters

Core Pain Points

1. LinkedIn users are uncomfortable with the process of initiating with strangers to connect with because:

   1. Users not knowing who to look for connections 

   2. Users not knowing what to ask specifically 

   3. Users being afraid of reaching out to strangers and risking a bad impression 

2. LinkedIn users do not have an organized area to find skill development opportunities as:

   1. Users have to mentally filter out relevant job information on newsfeed 

   2. Users are required to possess prior knowledge of a specific company to find applicable results through search query

Problem Statement:

People in the technology industry need an easier way to connect and communicate with field experts to organize small-scale meetings/gatherings in order to build up their professional profile to expand their career opportunities.

Personas

Our Personas show a Man making a career change, a computer science student trying to gain professional and career growth about to graduate, and a woman about to leave her current job looking for other opportunities and how they can benefit

Understanding Other Competitors

For our competitor analysis we compared LinkedIn to other applications that allow people to meet people through events or finding advice and support. We wanted to do more features on LinkedIn’s features, maybe there were features that don’t have a lot of recognition or visibility. Our team found out about LinkedIn Groups. We decided to conduct a survey poll of what people use to find events and what features have they heard of. In the survey we compared LinkedIn to Indeed, Facebook, Eventbrite, Handshake, and Glassdoor. We sent out this survey to multiple Facebook groups we were apart of and got 54 responses. We found 66.67% of users do not know what LinkedIn Groups were.

We decided to redesign a way to show more visibility for LinkedIn Groups and to Request Meet Ups from a user’s connections.

User Testing

Interview Task 

Prototype A 

1. Connect with people with similar interests in a group 

2. Follow an event organizer for event notifications 

3. Post/Approve an anonymous post

   We chose these task to see how they usually go through the app and if our design matches and flow with their plan of action.

Prototype B

1. Schedule/Cancel a meet up request

Our prototypes were primarily based off our UX flows but with some additional edits that isolated the UX flows and thus we have two prototypes. I created the paper screens for the prototype A tasks. In interviews we asked if they use LinkedIn, how they interact with their connections and if they have heard of LinkedIn groups before and if so, how many groups are they in, how do they interact with groups and why did they join the groups they are in. We chose these questions because we wanted to know the users thoughts and knowledge of the features before hand and if our redesign helps them. For Meet ups, we wanted to know if Meet ups is something people would be open to using and if it can be beneficial. We asked them to go through the task and while they go through it, to think out loud. We then asked how did they feel throughout the process, how would they use meet ups differently and why.

Prototype A vs Prototype B 

For prototype A we focused on a higher-level approach to making users more likely to interact, primarily through the use of LinkedIn’s groups feature. This contrasted with the approach we took for prototype B where our design was made to foster more personal connections between users by allowing them to schedule meet ups through LinkedIn’s messaging feature.

We conducted 3 low fidelity user tests at a Starbucks in order to get a diverse range of customers we also conducted another user testing in our classroom

POV

One of the primary barriers users seem to have on LinkedIn is being able to deepen their connections with people they haven’t yet met in person, especially if it’s a potential recruiter or mentor figure.

Prototype 1

We focused on creating an easier experience for users to directly find a connection and request a meet up. Used the messaging platform to send and receive meet up invitations. We made the meet up feature part of the additional features on LinkedIn messages which users can access by tapping on the plus icon on the left of the message text box. We also decided to merge the filtering feature from our first idea and that way users can connect with people with similar interests or careers and thus start more valuable conversations.

Prototype 2

From our user tests we found that the meet up feature was not visible or intuitive to find. We also find that users wondered if there were other options besides edit and accept an invitation. Lastly, a user found that invitations should be added to their google calendar.

We redesigned the invitation to be visually in synced with how Android calendar events are presented. We then redesigned the edit feature of the Meet up invitation where the invitation receiver has the option to ignore or decline the invitation. Based on our TA’s feedback, we added a character limitation, and focusing more on the material design and LinkedIn’s branding guidelines

The redesign of the invitation UI before and after. I created this redesign in order to make the invitation more embedded with the LinkedIn and Android UI style. We wanted more visibility with the details and that this can be synced with google calendar. I wanted times to be separate from editing and an accept option if the user is fine with all the details that have been set.

The redesign of the editing screen, there is more of a suggestion to ignore the request for the reasons are private. The difference between ignoring the request and declining a request, is that ignoring a request means the inviter will not see this and you can give private feedback to LinkedIn if you are uncomfortable with that user. Declining a request means that the inviter will see this and you can give an explanation on why you are declining the meet up request.

Reflection

This LinkedIn redesign taught my team and I how there are some features in an app that may not be taken advantage of when there is low visibility. From research I found that there is a significant amount of people are eager and want to meet with other professionals. Overall my team and I went through three iterations of what our redesign for LinkedIn should be.  We started with a design to promote events, to creating visibility in groups and then to creating meet ups and we believed from past ideas meet ups is the best redesign that includes LinkedIn’s goal of creating a better network for their user that will support their professional development.

For future work, I would want to do testing on the redesign with experienced professionals in the tech industry. I would want to see how do they respond to invitations and what do they see important with what features should be more visible or what features should not be as visible. 

Screens