LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 500 million members. As one of the most popular social media platforms for professionals, LinkedIn provides a way for users to connect with colleagues, discover career opportunities, showcase expertise, and build their professional brand. However, with increased competition from other professional networking sites and changes in user behavior, LinkedIn may need a redesign to maintain its dominance.
Some key questions around redesigning LinkedIn include:
- How can LinkedIn improve its user experience and interface?
- What new features and capabilities should LinkedIn add?
- How can LinkedIn better showcase professional profiles and accomplishments?
- How should LinkedIn refine its algorithm to provide more relevant connections and content?
- How can LinkedIn leverage data and insights to provide more value to users?
This article will explore how LinkedIn could be redesigned and upgraded to better serve its users and maintain its leadership in professional networking.
Improving LinkedIn’s User Experience
With over 500 million members, LinkedIn has an opportunity to enhance its user experience to keep users engaged and interacting on the platform. Here are some ways LinkedIn could improve its UX:
Simpler Navigation
LinkedIn’s desktop site and mobile app have a complex navigation with many tabs and menus. LinkedIn could simplify and declutter its navigation to make it easier for users to find what they need. Key pages and features should be accessible in just 1-2 taps or clicks.
Enhanced Search
LinkedIn search should be optimized to better index profiles, content, and jobs. Search filters and recommendations could help users find relevant people, groups, and opportunities on LinkedIn quickly.
Personalized Feed
LinkedIn’s feed is a jumble of random updates. By leveraging AI and machine learning, LinkedIn could offer a personalized feed with content and updates tailored to each user’s interests and connections.
Interactive Features
LinkedIn could add more interactive features like upvote/downvote buttons, polls, and live video to make consuming and engaging with content more engaging.
Simplified Messaging
LinkedIn messaging could be enhanced into a fuller communication platform with chat, bots, status updates, and seamless integration with email and calendar.
New Features and Capabilities
Here are some new features and capabilities LinkedIn should consider adding:
Professional Courses and Certifications
LinkedIn Learning offers courses but has potential to become a full-fledged edtech platform with paid certification programs in high-demand skills like programming, digital marketing, data science, etc. This would expand their elearning offerings.
Live Events and Webinars
Live audio and video events would make LinkedIn a hub for thought leadership and exchanging ideas, not just passive content consumption. Users could attend, speak at or host targeted professional events.
Marketplace for Services
LinkedIn could have a Upwork-like marketplace where freelancers could offer their services while businesses could post projects. Verified profiles and testimonials would facilitate connections.
Team Accounts
LinkedIn could allow groups and teams to have collaborative organizational accounts with shared permissions, team messaging, and ability to post updates collectively.
Clubhouse-style Audio Rooms
Live audio chat rooms focused on professional topics would be a new way to interact. Users could host rooms, hop between rooms, and meet new contacts through shared audio conversations.
Showcasing Profiles and Achievements
LinkedIn profiles are essentially online resumes. Here are some ways LinkedIn could enhance profiles:
Rich Media Support
Profiles should allow embedding video intros, slide decks, portfolios, code snippets, 3D models, and other multimedia to showcase skills and work.
Badges and Certifications
Completed courses, credentials, test scores, volunteer work, and other achievements could be displayed as visual badges on the profile.
Comprehensive Activity Feed
A feed showing all of a user’s engagements, content shares, and mentions would demonstrate influence and thought leadership.
Ratings and Testimonials
Professionals could be rated and reviewed for their skills just like products and businesses are rated on ecommerce sites. This enables reputation building.
Profile Verification
LinkedIn could verify education and employment with university and company partnerships. Verified profiles would build credibility and trust.
Refining the Algorithm
LinkedIn’s algorithm controls the feed, recommended connections, job recommendations, and other features. Some ways to improve it include:
Granular User Preference Inputs
Allow users to explicitly choose interests, skills, locations and industries they want to follow to get hyper-targeted recommendations.
Machine Learning
Analyze user behavior and connections to pick up implicit interests and provide smarter recommendations over time.
Search Ranking Optimization
Improve search relevance by ranking people and jobs user is most likely to interact with higher in search results.
Limit Low-Quality Content
Use AI to detect spam, advertising, and low-value posts and limit their reach and distribution. Promote content users find meaningful.
Leverage User Graph
Analyze the wisdom of the crowds by identifying trusted users, influencers, and high quality contributors to promote their posts and profiles.
Leveraging Data and Insights
With over 500 million users and a treasure trove of profile data, LinkedIn has a goldmine of data it can better leverage:
Job Trends and Salaries
Aggregate profiles to identify hiring demand, skill requirements, salaries, and growth opportunities across different locations, industries, and job types.
Identify Skill Gaps
Use profiles to determine skills employers need but can’t find and skills people have but aren’t fully utilizing to provide tailored coaching and training.
Trending Topics and Influencers
Determine topics gaining momentum and top voices driving conversations so users can capitalize on trends and engage experts.
Recommend Jobs and Candidates
Use skills, experience, interests, and other data signals to recommend open jobs users are qualified for and surface qualified candidates to employers.
Advertising Targeting
Segment users based on job function, seniority, skills, industry, location and other attributes for highly targeted marketing and recruiting.
Additional Features to Consider
Here are some other additional features LinkedIn could potentially add in a redesign:
Referrals and Introductions – Make it simple for users to refer someone or request a referral from within their network.
Reviews and Ratings for Companies – Allow users to rate and review companies they’ve worked for similar to Glassdoor. Give visibility into company culture, leadership, perks, etc.
Local Events and Meetups – Allow users to discover professional events happening in their city which they can join to meet new people.
Premium Subscription Service – Offer a premium paid subscription with additional features like unlimited InMail messages, virtual phone/fax service, unlimited profile views etc.
Resumé Builder and Career Coach – Provide tools to create stunning visual resumés optimized for recruitment algorithms and systems. Offer AI coaching for resumes and interviews.
News Feed Customization – Let users follow specific companies to get updates from their LinkedIn company page in their feed. Customizable news feed.
Scheduling and Calendar – Integrate calendars and scheduling systems so users can easily set up meetings with connections.
Professional Portfolios – Allow creators to create rich multimedia portfolios showcasing their work and achievements.
Alumni and Campus Groups – Let students connect with alumni from their university or join campus group networks even after graduation.
Integration with CRMs, Email, Calendars – Offer integrations with tools professionals use like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Gmail, Outlook etc.
Conclusion
Redesigning LinkedIn would be a major undertaking, but presents an opportunity to add valuable features and enhancements that would help LinkedIn maintain its leadership while keeping users more engaged. Key priorities would include improving user experience through simplification and personalization, adding interactive capabilities to become a true media platform, strengthening profiles and showcasing achievements, leveraging AI to refine the algorithm, and tapping into LinkedIn’s data to provide deeper insights.
Additional features like courses, live events, marketplaces, audio chat rooms, referrals, company reviews and more could also make LinkedIn stickier and differentiated from competitors. While a challenge, a thoughtful redesign could help LinkedIn gain many more years of momentum. The main risks would be alienating existing users with too much change or cluttering the platform with too many new bells and whistles. Thus any major redesign would need to be done carefully in iterative steps with extensive user feedback and testing.