Article 4

From Digital Culture & Society

Ranjit Dhaman and Jennifer Brackett are both responsible for the technical programming and designing of LinkedIn’s current user interface. They work out of LinkedIn’s headquarters, which is located in Sunnyvale, California. They consider themselves to be responsible for building a foundation for personal branding and help users understand how experiences and expectations might differ between various regions.

The largest professional social networking site had not revamped its desktop user interface since it first launched in 2002. This article and LinkedIn’s new interface makeover took place in 2017 – 15 years after the site had first launched! Rebuilding the user interface and LinkedIn’s reputation meant it would require a makeover that was streamlined and simplified. The project team from the LinkedIn headquarters that was tasked with this assignment wanted to first consolidate the most used features. They decided that making connections, sending messages and allow users to make their profiles more personal. The developers of the new interface used a hybrid approach, which meant they wanted to incorporate flexibility and transparency to be able to adapt to any future fast-changing requirements that could come up (Parsi, 2017).

It was important for the developers of the new interface to engage with users around the world to ensure that all changes would be universally accepted. They didn’t want users in other countries, such as India for example to reject the design or new colour template they chose. User experience researchers collected feedback by administering surveys, focus groups and one-on-one interviews. Some of the results they received back from this research included: it was difficult to find the “edit” button for user profiles and users wanted to receive alerts when someone comments on something they have shared or recent activity’s among their “connections” such as new job opportunities.

The new and improved design of LinkedIn’s user interface took the developers approximately one year to complete; they began in 2016 and it was launched in 2017. The developers stated communication was key throughout the whole project and was the reason why the new interface was so successful. The team also established processes to help prioritize the “must-have” features over the “nice-to-have” features and they also decided to only approve these features if user research supported it. After the development team launched the new LinkedIn site, it increased its user capacity and was now known as “way easier to navigate" (Parsi, 2017).

This article does not have any weaknesses in my opinion, only strengths. The LinkedIn user interface team worked together successfully to re-build a professional networking site that allowed users to gain more out of it. By doing so, they made sure the communication lines were open between the developers and welcomed feedback from the public. They also took into consideration their global users and ensured that different users in different regions would be satisfied with the professional networking site. This is a great strategy when building a digital platform that will be used around the world.

So what features on LinkedIn were actually new, after it’s interface overhaul…

• Refined Navigation
• Simplified search
• Messaging on all pages
• More personalized news feeds
• Easier to access personal profile and personal networks

The increase to personalize a user’s profile allows for them to brand their profiles in a simple and user-friendly way. Over the 15 years LinkedIn has been dominating the professional social networking platform, it has gone from 500,000 users to 500 million users. The main purpose of the site is so that members of the social media platform can present themselves in a way they choose to, to employers and other connections. People use LinkedIn to primarily grow their professional relationships, search for jobs and share their skills and experiences. This is all part of the personal branding process – and now you can see how the user interface came about in order for users to take advantage of this.

By: Natasha Bloomfield (Student #5735840)