LinkedIn Lethargy

LinkedIn has recently beautified their look with a clean, crisp, and metallic layout. While the new look adds class it doesn’t fix many of the issues and complaints most users voice. Rather, it adds new confusion to the UX flow, feels even slower than before, tries to take a leaf out of Facebook’s book, and I still don’t know where the alumni finder tool is.

Let’s dive into what LinkedIn has done well and what could be improved. The goal of a redesign should be to make user’s lives easier, provide an enhanced experience, and develop new or improved streams of revenue through products, features, and data. For casual users, this can mean making valuable features more prominent, streamlining the frequent tasks, and providing engaging content that encourages people to stick around #stickiness.

Focusing on revenue streams, LinkedIn makes the majority of its revenue 58%, as of September 2016, from recruitment solutions, specifically around hiring. To enhance this revenue stream, LinkedIn has been making it easier to identify top talent and easier for job seekers to apply and discover jobs. Recruiters are able to target candidates by the skills and experience they believe make a successful candidate for any position they’re seeking to fill. Job seekers receive personalized job recommendations through the jobs page as well as on companies’ LinkedIn profiles. In addition, the inApply feature allows job seekers to apply faster than ever with just their LinkedIn profile, a resume (optional), and no pesky cover letter. This is a slam dunk for all involved as it’s easier to apply and easier to find great talent.

The Good

1. New Fresh Look: It emotes a calming and sophisticated experience from the flat material design they are calling Art Deco, illustrated in site’s strong lines. However, for those art history buffs, it might seem like a bit of a misnomer. The colors LinkedIn uses emphasize its business-focused brand, the blue engendering trust, and leadership, or at least that’s what color theory tells me. All in all, the new layout provides an enhanced aesthetic.

1. Grab and Go Features: LinkedIn has made many of their valuable features even more prominent and easy to pinpoint by removing the old double navigation bars and combining them into a single larger banner with eye-catching icons.

LinkedIn’s also improved some of its core tools like Jobs. Job posts are easy to filter such as finding people in your alumni network thereby delivering more pertinent results. Though some features have been moved to paid tiers such as years of experience/seniority.

1. Quick Stats: The left banner shows high-level stats; a nice addition for managing who’s viewed your profile and figuring out the size of your network, which in the past was quite hard to pin down.

What Could Be Improved

1. Old Layout Nostalgia: The old layout featured drop-down menus showing the 3 or 4 most recent notifications, messages or jobs just by hovering over each corresponding icon. Currently, seeing any information about these pages requires one to load each page individually. These pages load slowly with a loading bar in the middle almost taunting you.

This ads a lot of friction as navigating to these pages can disrupt your job or talent search only to see an ad disguised as a message or notification about people in your network’s birthday. While this birthday feature might be helpful to reconnecting with people in your network, it feels a little too much like Facebook. In other words, I would love to see the drop downs come back!

1. Articles: When reading an article the navigation bar disappears. The goal, most likely, is to focus the user’s attention on the article. On the other hand, this is problematic when trying to navigate back to the person’s profile where you may have found the article, or if you’d like to see any page other than the homepage.

1. Glacial: After trying LinkedIn on a few different computers and Internet connections I find it loads quite slow across the board. The upside is it’s very responsive to different screens sizes across desktop, mobile, and tablet.
2. Messy Messaging: It appears LinkedIn is trying to emulate a more messenger focused experience like Facebook or WhatsApp. However, it can get very confusing as you accidentally write something rough, and see it sent after trying to add a space with enter.
3. Collapsed Experience: Hiding people’s job experience with collapsed tabs puts an overemphasis on simply job titles and adds steps towards learning more about someone’s experience, which makes people less likely to do so, hurting all involved.

Also, gone are the days of rearranging your experience to emphasize a specific skill set or project. Everything is strictly chronological. A benefit is that it does add some uniformity.

Conclusion

While copying some of the facets of Facebook might seem attractive and add some commonality across platforms, LinkedIn could do a better job of balancing the social with the professional. Additionally, there are many benefits around job searching and talent acquisition, but common functions in the job search have become cumbersome and continue to be hard to find. Overall LinkedIn is making promising strides forward with it’s sleek albeit slow site.