LinkedIn Design Exercise
Connect to classmates who can be
lifelong mentors, best teams, or help you land your dream job
Type Individual Project
Role UX Designer
Tools Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Protopie
Timespan Spring 2019 | One week
The Challenge
LinkedIn is a place where people can connect to people they know, in order to share professional experience and
opportunities. Professional networking can begin at any point, even in school. Increasingly, students are relying on
their mobile address book, and not their email address book, to manage their contacts.
Design an experience that helps college students discover and connect to their classmates, without relying on email.
JUMP PAST SOLUTION TO RESEARCH
Prototyping & Key Features
1. Switch to Student Mode
College students have options for registering a student account and can input information about their university.
This would allow college students to not only continue exploring outside of college career opportunities, but also enjoy exclusive space for college students in LinkedIn.
2. Discover & Work Together
Students can discover classmates who have similar career interest through LinkedIn profile, and they can validate peer capabilities with each other.
They can either find opportunities through postings by classmates or post their own things to find the best team members.
Once students find something attractive, students can request to join the work by using auto message.
3. Share your latest experiences
User research indicates that students want to find classmates who have recent recruiting experiences.
This Share tap would allow students to post any recent career-related experience or information that they want to share with classmates.
Based on postings, students can ask for advice, mock interviews or exchange valuable tips and information.
4. Find alumni in your industry
Students can find alumni through School tap, where they see all industries and find which alumni work for specific industries.
Also, the solution would suggest top-matched alumni based on students' profile. This would enable students to easily find the best person to ask for advice, mentorship, or referrals.
Students can also use auto-message when initiate the conversation.
5. Use dedicated messaging service
One of the primary reasons for why students prefer email over LinkedIn was because users do not check LinkedIn message regularly (since it only serves as a part of the entire service), so there is a delay in responding.
In order to address this problem, I suggest offering a separate messaging service, which solely focuses on messaging.
Doing this would help users facilitate communication through LinkedIn, and I believe Facebook messenger application can be a good bench-marking point.
Re-define the challenge
There are some keywords that need to be clearly re-defined for this challenge:
- College students: all levels of college students including undergraduate, graduate, and PhD
- Classmates: peers physically at the same school who have met, or who have not met before
- Without relying on email: without using any features of email
Given the fact that LinkedIn specializes in professional networking, I assumed that
all levels of college students want to develop connections with classmates through LinkedIn in order to:
1) view classmates' profiles to better understand their recruiting status
2) share previous job experiences
3) find peers who can work on any and all types of projects together for career development
After re-defining the challenge and having initial assumptions, I started to delve into the research phase.
User Research: Survey & Interviews
Keeping the initial assumptions in mind, my research goal was to better understand a college student's motivation and behavior when connecting to classmates; this would help me to validate my assumptions. The most imperative question for me was: if they want to connect to classmates through LinkedIn, why?
Also, it's important to know that how users generally feel about LinkedIn's current features and how its features do or do not help students connect with classmates. Plus, I would like to know what kinds of features of email have motivated students to use the service frequently when they want to connect with classmates.
The following are the core questions I wanted to address through research:
User:
1. What does "connect" mean to college students?
2. Why do students want to connect with their classmates through LinkedIn? What are their core motivations?
3. How do students connect with classmates? Via what methods and why?
4. What expectations do college students have for LinkedIn when they use the service?
LinkedIn current product & Email:
1. Which of LinkedIn's features help students get connected with their classmates?
2. Which parts are the most challenging when connecting with classmates through LinkedIn?
3. What are the greatest strengths of email when it helps students connect with their classmates?
To better understand the problem and needs, I tried to survey and interview as many students as possible, and ended up conducting survey with 50+ students and 10 in-depth user interviews.
Affinity Map & Key Insights
Based on data from survey and qualitative interviews, I used Affinity map to gather data and organize them into groups based on their relationship. Some key insights and user needs I found include:
1) Students are looking for an exclusive space that allows them to find classmates for their personal/coursework projects: LinkedIn can be an optimal platform for them to validate peers' working capabilities and recruit.
2) Students are looking for an exclusive space that allows them to share the most recent recruiting experience: students especially want to learn and share their interview experiences from peers.
3) Students are looking for alumni directory based on industry: students want to find all alumni based on industry and seek mentorship and advice.
4) Students are satisfied with the fact that almost everyone uses email and people are quick to respond: students found that LinkedIn messaging function serves as a part of the entire service, so overall, users do not check it as regularly as they do their email, nor do they respond as quickly.
Persona & Current User Flow
Based on key insights from the previous phase, I created a persona to better understand target users' needs and frustrations. After, I looked at current LinkedIn features and analyzed current user flows related to previous college students' needs.
Wireframing & User Testing
Based on previous phases, I decided key features for my design solutions. After, I began wireframing, and tested with users to gain feedback and iterate my design.
The following are key features in my design solution:
1)
Switch to student mode: students can enjoy exclusive space only for college students.
2)
Find classmates and work together: students can look for a) opportunities working together with classmates, or b) classmates who have similar career interests.
3)
Share the most recent experiences: students can share their recruiting experiences including recent interviews or preparation, and also find someone to ask for help or advice.
4)
Find your alumni in your industry: students can easily find alumni in the industry they are interested in and seek mentorship.
5) Use a dedicated LinkedIn's Messenger application: students can install LinkedIn's dedicated messenger app for mobile devices that allows you to chat with your LinkedIn connection more quickly and conveniently.
Final Design
Reflection
This project gave me two important takeaways.
One: re-defining problem phase and assumption-driven approach played a significant role.
When I first started this project, I re-defined the problem and started with some initial assumptions. Later, through user research, I validated these assumptions, and it turned out that it helped me a lot when narrowing the scope, conducting research and saving time. It also helped me not to lose the track of the research focus. Although not all assumptions were correct, by validating initial assumptions, I was able to facilitate the overall process more efficiently.
Two: user research is important when improving current products.
When I was first given the project, I decided to spend more than a half of the week in conducting user research. I tried to recruit users as many as possible, and in the end, I was able to conduct surveys with 50+ users and 10 user in-depth interviews. This research really helped me better understand user's motivations and frustrations for the existing product. From there, I was able to find design opportunities; it allowed me to have deeper understanding of the users.
Lastly, if I were make any difference in this project, I would:
1) take "feasibility" into consideration as some of my solutions included launching a new product,
2) broaden the user research spectrum, which would allow me to have diversity in users - I only surveyed and interviewed Michigan students,
3) conduct competitive analysis and more user testings so I can come up with better ideas for solutions and understand current trends in connecting with peers for college students,
4) explore onboarding experience design for both college student version and independent messenger application,
5) think deeply more about how my solution can affect non-student users, ensuring my solution do not negatively affect the majority of LinkedIn users.
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