LinkedIn School
Design Exercise for LinkedIn Internship
Context
7-day design exercise
LinkedIn Product Design Internship
Feb 2022
Key Contribution
User/product research
Wire-framing
High-fidelity prototypes
Usability testing
The prompt
How might we helping college students discover and connect to their classmates on LinkedIn?
Understanding the problem
What I first did is to identify the user journey of “Discover“ and “Connect“. What does these terms mean for a college student? I chatted with 8 undergrad and graduate students with these questions.
Alison’s journey
How she uses LinkedIn
She wants to
However, she thinks
Ideate for 4 stages
Brainstorming
Iterate designs with different POVs
Learning from LinkedIn designer on information architecture
I had two ideas for information architecture. 1. Create a new ‘school’ tab, or 2. Use the current “connection“ tab and navigate to different groups. After talking with a designer at LinkedIn, I decided to use option 2 because it takes into account of the user life cycle and scalability.
“Students and professionals are the same group of users at different stages. ”
- Product Designer from LinkedIn Profile
Learning from LinkedIn engineer on feature design
I wanted to create a more private space for classmates to connect. With the suggestion from the engineer, I decide to create this space inside school group instead of under the public feed.
“Yes, it’s possible to have user indicate if their comment is public or private. But creating a private space under public feed can feel confusing and exclusive. ”
- Software Engineer from LinkedIn Security Infrastructure
Learning from users on flows
Facilitate long-term and short-term behavioral changes
How can I make sure that freshmen students can receive help from alumnus, and once they graduate and gain experience, they give back to the community and make the system sustainable?
Therefore, we can prolong the product lifecycle and maintain user engagement. I broke down the stages of LinkedIn users to 3 stages: less experienced students, experienced students, professionals. For students, the behavioral change is quick and short-term with lots of motivations. For professionals, we aim for slower, long-term change because of the decreasing motivation.
Short-term behavioral change
Painpoint: Find & Understand
Students want to reach out to classmates with shared interest, backgrounds, or professional aspirations.
Solution: In common with you
Make it easy to understand classmates and make it natural to start the conversation.
Painpoint: Build relationship
Meaningful relationships often start with working together for a professional cause and extend to personal life, but LinkedIn doesn’t feel intimate.
Solution: Centralized feed
Create in-group feed and learning space for alumni engaged posts and LinkedIn Learning courses.
Long-term behavioral change
Painpoint: LinkedIn usage is short-term
Small initiatives taken by alumni and upper class students to share their journey can largely encourage new students to reach out. However, LinkedIn usage is short-term and many only use it as a job-hunting tool.
Solution: Open to share
Create a culture where users receive help and provide help without being overwhelmed.
Reflection
👩🦯 Accessibility
I checked the color contrast and color blind guidance to make sure that the badge is accessible to users with visual impairment. Below are the color comparison of badge to users with normal vision and achromatomaly vision. Sound cues and haptic responses to supplement the visual information, especially to the onboarding section with relatively high information density.
👩 Research
Quantitative: A/B testing
Qualitative: User insights from marginalized student groups with less professional opportunities
🚀 Impact
Short term: User engagement, new user growth
Long term: User satisfaction level, retention and engagement in school groups after graduation