5 Features I Would Add to LinkedIn
By: Abhishek Sharma
Tags: Product Management, LinkedIn

5 Features I Would Add to LinkedIn

I love LinkedIn. After my email platform, LinkedIn is my most visited web page.

One of the things I love most about LinkedIn as a company is exemplified by these screenshots:

An influencer voiced a common issue with the mobile app that many users experience, and what did the CEO do? Make excuses or become defenseive? No, he simply tagged his VP’s of Product and Engineering in a comment, alluding to the fact that they would work on prioritizing this problem. This gave me a lot of respect not just for Jeff Weiner, but the entire LinkedIn organization. I did some more digging and found that the VP of Product at LinkedIn, Kiran Prasad, spends a considerable amount of time mining feedback directly from users.

It’s great to see companies that listen to their users, even at the C-level.

While I love using LinkedIn, I’ve noticed some things that could be improved about its consumer product line. As a personal exercise in Product Analysis, I’ve written some potential features/improvements to this product that I would love to see implemented.

As LinkedIn is a large company with tons of talented UX designers, PM’s, etc. they’ve already created a really user-friendly platform. Consequently, some of these suggestions are small features. They are sorted in order of highest priority (in my opinion) to lowest.

1. Influencer Polling

Right now, influencers can post articles, videos, pictures, and other content to entertain or educate their followers. Many influencers tend to ask questions to their audiences, prompting answers in the audience. Here’s a mockup of a potential feature for these situations:

Mockup designed in Canva

If a prominent Tech Executive wants to ask their followers which programming language they prefer, or how they feel about a certain feature being cut from their product, they could receive consolidated results easily with a polling feature. Like the commenting feature, polling turns influencer-follower communication into a 2-way street, allowing both sides to create value for the other.

This development can result in lots of feature variety:

Different charts for visualization (bar, pie, histogram).

Limit who can respond (ex: soliciting insights from Engineers).

Allow followers to add their own custom answers to your poll.

Influencer polling goes hand-in-hand with LinkedIn’s mission of creating an interactive networking experience for professionals. It allows one to contribute to an active discussion of preferences while at the same time visualizing their viewpoint in the context of their respective online community.

2. ‘Incoming’ Position on Profile

Mockup created in Canva

When college students score internships for the next summer, many take to LinkedIn to update their network about their plans. LinkedIn doesn’t currently allow you to list a position with a start date in the future.

This segment of LinkedIn’s user base could benefit from an ‘incoming position’ feature, which lets you list your future position, along with start date.

3. Build Profile from Resume

It’s key for growth that a product have a rapid onboarding process. I went through the account creation process again to test out the experience for myself, and found that all information must be manually entered by the user.

A suggested pipeline for the LinkedIn onboarding process.

While this is the most accurate way to fill out a LinkedIn profile, the option of uploading your resume and having the website automatically generate your profile could be helpful to older age brackets who aren’t looking to spend a lot of time refining their page.

If the technology doesn’t exist, it may be of use for LinkedIn to acquire an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) tool like Lever.co. Many users don’t flesh out job descriptions on their page, but will ‘Easy Apply’ to jobs on LinkedIn. Asking for their resume, and putting it through an ATS could help in these situations as well.

4. Improved Web Profile Content Viewing

Right now, attaching a resume or video to your LinkedIn profile has an extremely unsexy design. Here’s how it looks on my 15-inch macbook pro:

Screenshot from LinkedIn website

This issue is connected to LinkedIn’s insistence on integrating technology from Slideshare, a company they acquired in 2014. When you click ‘view’, the PDF is displayed using Slideshare’s browser view. One particularly annoying feature of this view is that when you scroll all the way down, Slideshare doesn’t allow you to scroll back up, unless you click ‘view again’. Plus, the PDF is loaded in low resolution, which could give off a bad impression to Recruiters that don’t know how the Slideshare technology works.

A simple fix for this is to enlarge the resume view, or directly open the PDF file in a new tab upon click.

Here are some suggestions on how video-viewing could be improved:

Documents + Videos: Upon click, the content opens in a new tab (most compatible with all screen sizes).

2. Videos: Upon click, the content expands inline (difficult to implement for mobile app).

5. Mobile App: Full Swipe Back

For users like myself, who like to use our iPhone 8+ with one hand, it can be inconvenient to reach your thumb all the way to the left side of the screen to swipe back from a view such as this:

In apps like Facebook mobile, one can swipe back from the center of the page. Here is a video displaying the comparison between the two.

Comparison of LinkedIn’s touch screen swiping with Facebook’s. Facebook has a smoother interface.

As you can see, the Facebook app allows you to swipe back from the center of the screen, but in LinkedIn’s mobile app, you have to begin the swiping motion all the way from the left edge of the screen. For a right handed person like myself using the iPhone 8+, this is an unnatural motion, which temporarily makes me loosen my hold on the phone. Fortunately, my pop socket allows me to retain control.

I would classify this as a low-priority feature, as the simple user-side solution is to just hold your phone with two hands. However, this would greatly improve the convenience of using LinkedIn with one hand during my long commutes on BART.

Conclusion

Again, LinkedIn is currently my favorite website, and I love logging in and seeing informative content in AI, Product Management, and Venture Capital. It’s where dreams have been made, and careers transformed. With the improvements I’ve suggested in this article, I believe LinkedIn can take their user engagement to the next level. Thanks for reading!