On the first night, I started discovery, I read the brief and summarized it. Then I looked for some of the competition online. The Dots and Contra stood out as communities where you could find employment and show your work..
LinkedIn has secured itself as the de facto job search social network - using it is a graduation requirement, and it’s probably the only social network that Baby Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z all use regularly. LinkedIn has also achieved an often un-sung achievement - completely dodging the current social media crisis concerning privacy and toxic third-party propaganda.
While LinkedIn remains a secure and promising resource for job-seekers, the way in which you’re allowed to present your work-self is still very much rooted in an older era of job searching. LinkedIn is essentially a dynamic, hyperlinked resume. As such, people in creative, technical, and craft-based industries are limited in the content they can showcase. Most often, these users will be forced to host any sort of visual, animated, or coded work on another website, like a personal portfolio or GitHub repository.
LinkedIn wants to create more tools for makers to show off their work - by displaying projects, rich media, and more without relying on something like Squarespace.
On the morning of the fourth, we met as a team and outlined our workflow. Quickly arriving on a series of tools that would allow us to collaborate efficiently, maintain brand guidelines, and track billable time. We roughed out a timeline with aggressive delivery dates for key elements or waypoints.
The Research:
We knew that we needed to look into how creatives currently use the platform, what they felt worked, and where they were underserved. We also wanted to better understand what the competition looked like. These two methods became the core of our research. From this data, we used a variety of methods to formulate a persona and a core set of pain points.
We decided it was best to split up tasks, so I and one other person started putting together questions for user interviews. There were two main categories that we wanted to explore.
Networking: How and why
Showing Work: Displaying and Promoting
When having internal conversations about the brand itself, we landed two main user groups: People looking for work and entities looking to find employees. We decided to focus mainly on people looking for work, but we also wanted to interview all users.
We arrived at 8 main questions, with an additional 7 clarifying questions. It was clear that there was a strong brand that we needed to work within, but we wanted to think outside of the box in the beginning. We conducted interviews from Tuesday the 4th through that Friday. The interviewees came from various places in their creative careers. We spoke to job seekers, the employed, and employers.
While these interviews were being conducted, we also ran a competitive analysis on The Dots, Contra, Instagram (preliminary interviews mentioned Instagram), Dribbble, and GitHub. We were also looking at web page builders like Wix and Squarespace.
What the research was starting to show is that people want to have full control of their content. Creatives will often use multiple systems to house and talk about their work/ services. They would display their visual work on Dribble and talk about it on LinkedIn while showing their code on GitHub and possibly even have their own web page or three.
There was another problem, LinkedIn’s image. Over 50% of our interviews showed disinterest in the platform, with people going as far as to state that it makes them feel commoditized and undervalued. It was becoming clear that a majority of creatives did not like using LinkedIn. We were starting to formulate some assumptions, but wanted to see the data synthesized before making the next steps.
By the end of the week, there was good progress on the affinity map and a rough persona taking form. The competitive analysis was done, and we had also come up with some “How Might We” statements based on our assumptions. By late Friday, we had a Persona; meet Madelyn Torff.
Madelyn came with a problem statement:
"Madelyn Torff needs a more dynamic way to showcase her creativity in order to build meaningful connections and advance her career because professional networking platforms feel too formal and limit the ways she can express her personality and creative work."
Once we had a problem statement to work with, we started ideating. We talked about whether our changes would be on the web page or the app.
We also started to believe that in order to maximize the platform’s use, we needed to drive more interaction. Our research showed that a majority of creatives on LinkedIn don’t engage with their community. This realization sent us down a rabbit hole, which caused us some issues a few days later.
Ideation & Design:
Monday came around, and we had shifted from our research synthesis into ideation. The four of us worked on sketching and our list of potential changes while also looking for design inspiration.
I was starting to develop some strong opinions around a need to better display media-rich content and rich text. I was also of the opinion that the profile page could need more customization. There were already tools in place to change how the information was held within each section of the profile, but there was no way to prioritize or reorder sections. This was one of the main changes I believed we needed.
As I explored LinkedIn more, I realized that both the “featured” and the “projects” sections did a horrible job of displaying the content on the profile page. There was no way to control how a hero image was cropped, and there was little you could do to change what text was displayed.
As I was developing these ideas, a few others on the team started to ideate on a much more visual design. A portfolio page was starting to enter the conversation, along with a dramatic redesign of the feed. There was this growing opinion that we needed to make LinkedIn more visual to entice the creative professional into wanting to use the platform.
We were also starting to encounter another issue. This team was prone to very long meetings with no structure and no actionables recorded. We would often find ourselves in fruitless conversations for hours on end. It was starting to get in the way of our ability to complete important waypoints in the process.
It was now Tuesday, and we had concluded our research. Spirits were high as we started to formalize our ideas around restructuring the feed, adding better tools to post creative work, as well as adding some form of a portfolio. Then, in the early afternoon, we had a check-in with a key stakeholder.
This review of our progress didn’t go the way we wanted it. The feedback was that we had completely missed the mark. The ideas we presented to drive engagement were seen as us trying to make LinkedIn into Instagram. We were told to focus more on what LinkedIn already does well. One of the main takeaways was that we didn't seem to understand what LinkedIn is. Once we concluded the meeting, the team was shell-shocked. We all needed a few hours to gather our thoughts, so we didn't come back together until the end of the day.
When we finally came back together at the end of Tuesday, our momentum had been completely stalled. It was always clear to me that LinkedIn was a widely accepted brand that limited us in what we could do. So, I tried to rally the team. My opinion had always been that a portfolio was a stretch and that we needed to lean into allowing more control within LinkedIn’s current framework. I was also constantly asking, "How will non-creatives use this feature?", as I was fearful of adding things that wouldn’t be useful to a majority of LinkedIn’s users. Unfortunately, it took us a few more days to reconvene on the ideas we had already been exploring.
During the time we spent licking our wounds, some of us went back into the research data while others pushed on with site maps and task flows. We knew that mapping out LinkedIn’s entire site was going to be quite a task but also not very helpful so we decided to focus on the areas of the website that we would be changing.
Finishing the site map gave us more clarity on a task flow to explore in the prototype. We were quickly approaching the end of the week and our delivery date. We had started on the wireframes earlier in the week, but since we had not decided on a direction, we had a lot of work to do.
By Friday, we had completed a journey map and had a rough understanding of the systems we were developing. We had arrived at a few key changes and one big addition.
The homepage or “feed” would see some slight changes. Posts were going to be image first and text second. Posts would also allow for the user to control how the images are cropped.
The profile page will see some drastic changes. You could now reorder the sections in order to prioritize other modules. As you can see here, Madelyn chose features, then experience, and recommendations. The featured and project sections would also carry over the new content controls that would allow her to change how her content is displayed. Most importantly, she took advantage of our new “portfolio” tab, which would allow her to host “portfolio projects” in a content-rich environment. These portfolio projects would allow her to leverage all of the pre-existing means of classification that LinkedIn has to offer. She could tag companies and collaborators she worked with; skills used or learned could be listed as well. She even had a unique, simplified domain name (301 redirect) associated with the portfolio tab.
We got to work in Figma but we only had a few days left… and we also had a few other big hurdles to overcome.
First, we didn’t really understand how this portfolio was going to work.
Second, we had not set up the Figma file’s variables or text styles properly, so it was quickly straying from any standards the LinkedIn brand has established.
The week was done, we had some half-baked wireframes and 4 days. So we divided up the tasks and hunkered down for some long nights. One of the other teammates and I set to work on ideating the portfolio process. We took largely from sites like Wix and Squarespace as they have a tried and true method of developing simple but effective portfolios. I would spend the next 4 days tirelessly combing the Figma files to make sure that all brand guidelines, layout standards, and heuristic choices were being adhered to. Another teammate started working on our presentation deck, and the fourth spent her remaining days supporting the three of us.
The day before delivery, we were 95% complete, and we decided to run some usability tests. Since we didn't have much time, we were only able to get a couple out of the way, but it was pretty clear to us that the features were well received. There were some sticky points in the testing centering on verbiage and button placement/ state changes. We would have liked to run some more tests before assuming what the fix should look like, but there just wasn’t any time left…
It was Wednesday, March 19th, and we had a finished prototype. We ran through the presentation with the last hour we had and sent it.
I am very proud of where this project arrived. Next steps would be to run some more usability tests and really fine tune the portfolio’s integration into the platform. I would also like to explore what a hiring manager would get from these feature adds. LinkedIn Creative was a wonderful thought piece; I would love to see it through to reality.