Overview

Team: 4 people, 2 on research and 2 on design

Role: UX Designer

Duration: 2 week sprint

Tools: Figma, Slack, Google Suites, Asana, Zoom, Miro

Methods: Interviews | Affinity mapping | Persona development | User journey | Site mapping | Competitive/comparative analysis | Heuristic evaluation | Design studio | Lo-fi sketching | Mid-fi wireframing | Prototyping | Hi-fi prototyping | User testing

Index: Introduction | Research | Design | User Testing | Iteration | Reflection and Next Steps

*Methods in bold are the ones I specifically took part in for this project

Introduction

This is a four person team project in which I was responsible, alongside one other person, to create the sketches, wireframes, and prototypes. I will briefly go over the research that my teammates conducted in order to provide context for which the design was made as well as show the parts of the prototype that I was responsible for.

Research

Our team was tasked with improving the current LinkedIn site in three ways:

• Users will have an easier way of knowing who in their network to contact in order to progress within their industry of interest

• Users will have an easier way of knowing when to contact valuable connections

• Users will be able to track the effectiveness of their outreach

The main problem that we were to tackle was that users would often network outside of LinkedIn. By addressing the above improvements, we hoped that more networking would occur within LinkedIn, thereby increasing engagement and usage.

Competitive Analysis

In order to pinpoint gaps in the features that LinkedIn offers, my partner and I conducted a competitive/comparative analysis between LinkedIn and 5 of its competitors and comparators.

Through this analysis, we found that LinkedIn was missing a way for users to track the efficacy of their outreach and create groups of multiple people that they could message at once. We decided to tackle these gaps by adding these features in our prototype.

Discovery Interviews

In order to better understand the way our user needs and frustrations, our research team conducted 6 interviews with current LinkedIn users with the following key characteristics:

• 24-30 years old

• Entry level/transitioning careers

• Use LinkedIn at least once per week

Our research team was able to organize the data from interviews into these key points:

• Users value connections in their industry

• Users value connections who work at companies where they want to work

• Users do not currently have a system for organizing messages

• Users currently have to scroll through recent messages to keep track of conversations

Persona

Using the key insights from our 6 interviews, our research team was able to create our persona, Ashley.

Like other LinkedIn users, Ashley shares the following wants and frustrations:

• Wants to connect with others in her industry

• Wants to leverage her current connections

• Is annoyed that she has no way to organize her messages

The Problem

As a team, we were able to create the following problem statement to encompass Ashley’s needs and figure out how we might be able to improve her experience on LinkedIn:

Ashley needs a way to efficiently network with people in her industry as well as utilize the connections she already has.

Solutions

Knowing Ashley’s needs and frustrations, we were able to craft the following solutions:

• Provide Ashley with recommendations for who to connect with based on her industry of interest and mutual connections

• Provide recommendations for how to connect with others and what to write in messages

• Provide a feature for Ashley to mark interactions as successful or ongoing

Design

Sketches

My partner created the sketch above, which I used to create the filtering option for the desktop version of our site. Here, the filters are to the right of the search bar rather than on the left sidebar. Another feature in this sketch is that the filters in use are shown underneath the search bar, so that users can easily be reminded of what their results are filtered by, and can easily delete the filters they are no longer interested in using.

The sketch above is mine, showing the filtering options to the left sidebar. I was influenced by the filtering features often found on e-commerce sites selling clothing. However, we chose not to go with this idea, as it would not be feasible for our mobile version. We wanted to make sure our desktop and mobile sites were as similar as possible, so users familiar with one over the other could easily make the transition.

Mid-Fi Wireframes

Using these sketches as reference, my partner and I then split duties and worked on mid-fi wireframes to bring the sketches to life. My partner took on the messaging features, while I took on the networking feature.

This is the mid-fi wireframe for our home page of the desktop site. It very closely resembles the current LinkedIn homepage.

Here, on the My Network page, we can see that there is the added filtering function next to the search bar.

This is the mobile version of our homepage and My Network page. The filtering function is similarly next to the search bar, and existing filters appear underneath the bar, where users can easily view them and delete them if they no longer wish to use them.

User Testing

Our research team conducted user testing on our mid-fi prototypes with 4 participants on the mid-fi mobile prototype and 5 participants on the desktop prototype. These participants were all users familiar with the LinkedIn mobile and desktop sites, and were located in different regions of the United States. These are some of our research team’s findings:

• The average for users to complete one task on the mobile website was 10 seconds and 3 clicks

• The average for users to complete one task on the desktop site was 7.5 seconds and 2 clicks

• Users experienced challenges in the first task, which was to filter for connections in the gaming industry

• Users first tried clicking on “My Connections” at the left sidebar rather than the filtering button to the right of the search bar

Next Steps and Reflections

I am very grateful to have an incredible team of talented UX Designers and Researchers to work with and learn from. There are some things we could do as next steps to further improve LinkedIn if I were to be given the wonderful opportunity to continue working with them. They are as following:

Must Do:

• Conduct further user testing, particularly on the newly added “My Industry” tab and use data to improve the feature with more iterations

Should Do:

• Add a note-taking feature to our messaging page so that users can take notes of advice or of their progress next to each of their messages, which will allow them to search for messages more easily and record important thoughts

Could Do:

• Add a verification process for recruiters. While we added a recruiter badge, we did not build out a verification process for recruiters to get this badge as it was not relevant to Ashley’s needs, but we can add that process in the future

To reflect, I thoroughly enjoyed working with a team and look forward to more opportunities to collaborate with others in my future. I also enjoyed the challenge of having to find new solutions after user testing revealed the challenges our users had with our initial design. I am grateful for the chance to exercise flexible thinking and am excited to continue improving this design.