Reimagining LinkedIn
For a few years I put off making a LinkedIn profile. I had seen it a few times through others, and something about the site seriously put me off from it. Eventually I had to join the masses and get on the network, but I was reluctant, and still haven’t built my profile out to the extent that I should. It took me a year or two of use to realize the reason I disliked using LinkedIn - its bad! The whole site has an outdated vibe, and the home page is cluttered to the point of overwhelming. The interactions are sometimes quite unintuitive, and the notification system is populated by often irrelevant information. I believe that the only reason it has gained the significance it has is because of the broad range of services it provides. Most modern professionals cannot avoid being on LinkedIn, which means that the design can be lackluster and it will still have a massive user base.
As Oksana Tunikova put it, “There is only a certain amount of information a human brain can process at one time.”
Its high time LinkedIn got a facelift. As a creative challenge and HTML + CSS exercise, I redesigned the home page from scratch. To build a design with reason, I did some research on LinkedIn’s revenue. According to Investopedia, before LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft “65% of third-quarter revenue, totaling $960 million, came from recruitment services.” This means that LinkedIn’s job network is arguably the most important aspect of the site. Recruitment services is followed by ads on the site, which makes up 18% of revenue, and the remaining 17% is from premium memberships.
With this data, I had a clear idea of what to prioritize on the home page, besides the connections feed. I kept the promoted jobs, posts, and sidebar ads with a similar ratio of content to ads as the current LinkedIn. Additionally I added a Jobs section to the left column, which is prime, eye-catching real estate that is currently wasted on following hashtags.
Here is how I think LinkedIn should look...
