Designing a simpler, more inclusive Linkedin Home & Sharing experience
With over two years at LinkedIn, I’m excited to share my journey and showcase some work. LinkedIn, known for its corporate vibe, presented unique challenges and opportunities to humanize content and design, which I was eager to contribute to.
During my time at Google, I developed a passion for designing scalable product UI, contributing to growth through vetted, standardized design. LinkedIn soon sought to broaden its reach and simplify processes by modernizing its experiences.
Ultimately, I joined the Content Experience team, working primarily across the Home and Sharing pillars, high-level tracks that trickled into several smaller projects over several quarters.
Role
- Sr. Designer/Track Lead: Led scrums, collaborated with cross-functional teams, facilitated workshops, mentored, and served as Posting lead on experiences like Videos, Pages, and Stories.
- Full-Stack Product Design: Designed visuals, user experiences, prototypes, and motion; crafted all design elements unless sourced from the Design System.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Partnered with teams (Conversations, Infra, Design Systems, Video, Stories) to improve content creation, engagement, and trust across LinkedIn.
Impact
- Mobile-First Design: Improved usage across home and sharing cases, starting with a modernized, mobile-first feed UI (iOS), a simpler posting UX, and moderation controls.
- Growth Metrics: Grew hero metrics for net content creation and creators by xx/yy.
- Partnership Foundation: Established a foundation for partners to plug into.
- Design Systems Collaboration: Worked with the design systems team to ensure consistency and scalability, and contributed new components for future projects.
- Mentorship: Provided formal and informal mentorship to junior designers.
- Inclusive Design: Improved WCAG-compliant guidelines, orientation support, and screen reading with aria labels.
Problems
- Unclear, unscalable, complex: Sharing was often unclear to users and difficult to scale out.
- Noisy, web-focused, dated: Home experience was riddled with inconsistencies, catered to a narrow surface lens, and built on debt.
- Cold & Corporate Tone: Non-tech-savvy users and those with accessibility needs struggled to use LinkedIn as they felt the cold, corporate vibe catered to a less diverse crowd.
- Couldn’t scale: An incoming design system (typography, color, etc.) is needed to modernize debt, velocity, and accessibility, allowing future flexibility across partner teams and content types, like Pages, Ads, and Video.
- A barrier to entry for posting: Members are afraid of putting their reputations at risk. How can clarity, control, and confidence ease fears and lower the barrier to contributions?
I won’t post because I don’t know what all these things mean or who will see it. My feed is cluttered and I don’t know what all the tabs are, why would I go to them?
Qual and Quant Research
- User Interviews: Worked with researchers to conduct formative and evaluative interviews, cafe studies, and more to understand user pain points and needs.
- Accessibility & Systems: Work with DS/Infra and various user types to audit and ensure accessibility in UI standards, while stress testing and or integrating net new design components offered by the Design System team.
- Benchmarks & Data: Collaborated with researchers to identify patterns and constraints, including challenges with Sponsored Revenue Content and previous experiments. Poor click-through rates, drop-offs during posting, and the need to maintain or increase sponsored content engagement played large roles.
Hypothesis & Goals
Through experimentation and Figma kits, develop a simplified, inclusive, and scalable experience that will help users better navigate and share with confidence while setting LinkedIn up for faster design iterations, consistent components, and a language that drives trust with users.
Guiding Principles & Framework
- Humanized: Work with Marketing and Design Systems to boast a wider range of humanized messaging, tappable components, and warmer colors to migrate away from the cold and corporate feel.
- Clear & Simple: Create a clean, consistent, intuitive interface that minimizes steps and reduces cognitive load when consuming.
- Inclusive: Ensured the platform was accessible to all users, incorporating features like screen reader compatibility, clearer content design guidance, responsive layouts, and adjustable text sizes.
- Scalable: Test and iterate on cross-functional and vertical-supported UI and components using Figma and Atomic design principles.
Analysis, Experiments & Rapid Prototyping
- Competitive Analysis: Studied and took inspiration from platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Quora — exposing best practices and opportunities for differentiation.
- Experiments: We ran several short and long-term experiments to help validate our hypothesis and explorations.
- Rapid Prototyping: Worked with Research and Product to design and test mock-ups using qual and quantitative insights—quick, effective prototyping in Principle, Figma, and code.
End-to-end support: Scaled UI patterns to work across partner teams
Sequencing & Scaling out
Pushed for a phased ramp-up and out approach (Vision to Milestones) to roll out features, allowing for continuous user feedback and iterative improvements. This helped in monitoring development timelines and incremental metric changes at each stage.
Outcome
The revamped home-sharing platform significantly enhanced user experience, resulting in positive feedback. Users praised the simplicity and inclusivity of the design, which made it easier for a wider range of users to participate in home-sharing. The design was validated through mixed methods research, ensuring it met user needs and adhered to accessibility standards.
By focusing on user needs, and accessibility, and working closely with design systems, we created a platform that was not only easier to use but also more welcoming and inclusive, helping to grow the LinkedIn home and sharing experiences.
Conclusion
- Gratitude: Thankful to my colleagues, friends, and leads for helping me grow as a designer and gaining friendships along the way.
- Collaboration Shoutouts: Special thanks to the Infra and design systems teams for their collaboration on the feed, and huge props to my core design and Sharing team — Howie, Hemant, and Doug — for their dedication.
- Project Contributions: Contributed to diverse projects, enhancing key features like Sharebox Guider, Visibility Redesign, Feed Page Sharing, Polls, Comment Controls, Sticky Visibility, and WCAG support on both web and mobile platforms.
Press
A note from Ryan Roslanksy on the overall modernization design effort
Thoughts from our engineering lead on building Mercado
USA Today Spotlight on Linkedin’s new design
Linkedin Polls on Tech Crunch
