DaN Enz Design
With over 810 million profiles in more than 200 countries, LinkedIn is the premier job searching and professional social media platform. For most, the job search and talent sourcing is synonymous with the services offered by LinkedIn. Over 48 million people search for jobs on the platform a day. According to LinkedIn, the highest in demand skill is creativity.
Timeline: Two Weeks
Role: UX/UI Designer
Team: Erika McWhinnie & Ron Khoury
create a profile or
view profile as recruiter
-user survey
-interviews
-affinity mapping
-"I" statements
-user personas
-problem statement
-"how might we" questions
-competitive analysis
-current state audit
-solution statement
-principles & style guide
-site mapping
-user flow
-sketches
-wireframing
-usability testing
-a/b testing
-design iteration
-high fidelity prototype
Our fully integrated approach to displaying rich media content on LinkedIn will give creatives & recruiters a better solution to showcase & review portfolio content.
We compiled observations & quotes from survey results & interview and organized them into an affinity map.
Users want simple, customizable solutions to show off their creative work to recruiters.
Two sides of the same coin: both creative jobseekers & creative recruiters alike would benefit from creative solutions on site.
Community typeface (Source sans pro), rounded tiles, and LinkedIn Blue.
We prioritized solutionizing within LinkedIn’s current site, style guide, and brand identity to seamlessly add a creative content option to the well established site.
At first, we called the new feature “Retrospective” because the design team thought that the term “Portfolio” may not be inclusive of certain media like blog posts or code. A “Retrospective” means to look back upon past situations, and may be more inclusive. Due to their positioning, LinkedIn also may have enough influence to introduce feature affordances and define their own signifiers (such as Retrospective as the name). We put it to the test.
In, Mid-fi usability testing, we A/B tested “Retrospective” vs “Portfolio”. Two identical Mid-fi prototypes were presented to users, the only difference was the feature name throughout the prototype.
Results: 2/2 of the users who tested the “Retrospective” prototype had difficulty finding the feature & inquired about the name. After the test, all 5 users from A & B said they preferred portfolio over retrospective. Portfolio it was then.
Large tile for one featured project on the profile page.
View multiple projects on the profile page without taking up too much space. Show don’t tell approach to content on profile, additional information available on Portfolio by clicking on project. Click through directly to the project on the Portfolio.
Portfolio owners want a way to organize and display their projects and content.
Added a feature to profile toggle, portfolio sub-navigation for project categories, change order.
Creatives want confirmation of success when uploading content.
Added UX writing to verify success when advancing through the flow.
Recruiters and third parties need to move easily between Profile and Portfolio.
Add additional CTAs to Global navigation to move the user back to the Profile.
Users want to be able to choose when their content is visible.
Save as draft feature for blog posts & view on profile toggle so users can add, work on their content, & publish when it is ready.
