Project Overview
Users access LinkedIn everyday to advance their career, whether it’s by connecting with their colleagues, absorbing the great content on the platform, or seeking their next job opportunity. One of the main reasons I became a user back in 2014 was to seek guidance from professionals in the tech industry, and I wasn’t the only one. Over the years, LinkedIn caught on to the fact that users wanted to have a medium in which they could connect with other professionals for guidance and light-touch mentorship.
Fast forward to 2017, and Linkedin rolled out a product called Career Advice, which helps connect members across the LinkedIn network with one another for lightweight mentorship opportunities. This feature, at its core, has tremendous value and I use it on a daily basis to connect with professionals and gain insight from their experiences. While using Career Advice, I noticed some friction-points in the product, which led me to rethink the feature. From my observations, I decided to take on this project to improve the user experience of Career Advice.
Challenge
Linkedin is currently trying to figure out intuitive ways to improve the experience of the feature. We wanted to further investigate ways in which we can increase the awareness and engagement of the feature by developing the value proposition of the product for both the Career Advice-Giver and Seeker. Through extensive user research, however, we found that there were various barriers that were critical to the overall experience of the user.
Process
To better understand the pain points of users when utilizing the feature, I conducted 10+ user interviews and performed a broad scan of the career advice platform. I synthesized all the information I gathered from my research and I was able to gather some root problems and potential solutions to improve the career advice feature.
User Research
Observations of the platform
To inquire a better understanding of the platform, I decided to sign up for the feature and use it for over six months and position myself in the shoes of the user (advice seeker). Through this experience, I noticed that the the tool provides tremendous value but there were a few components of the feature that required improvement. I was able to connect with plenty of professionals throughout various industries who are working on some awesome projects. It was important for me to utilize the product myself because it allowed me to have a user-centered approach to solving user pain points.
Conversations with users who seek career advice
Given that I gained great insight by using the product, I also wanted to take it a step forward and gain more insight on the user. I decided to conduct about ten user interviews to gain a better understanding of their experience with the feature. Here are some insights I gained from the interviews:
I love using the feature because it allows me to connect with professionals that could help me find job opportunities within their respective companies but if there was one thing that I struggled with the most, it would have to be finding the career advice hub button on the mobile app. Is Linkedin trying to hide the button?”
- Recent Engineering graduate living in San Francisco, CA
“I use Career Advice to network with professionals in the design industry. Even though it’s a hit or miss with the responses that I receive, I’m still having a hard time figuring out what the value behind the product is, other than connecting you with professionals.”
- 4th year student at Rutgers University
“I was totally confused when signing up for the feature. It prompted me to sign up for the feature with quite a bit of steps and then it landed me on the career advice hub. It took me some time to figure out what this tool actually does.”
- 4th year student at Santa Clara University
Key Takeaways
Onboarding experience was unwelcoming
Even though the onboarding experience provided a general overview of how the feature works, it didn’t provide context on how the user could receive value from using Career Advice. The act of reaching out to someone on LinkedIn can be a daunting experience and it’s important that the onboarding experience excites the user and reduces any hesitation the user might have about reaching out to others.
Few entry points
As I highlighted above, Career Advice provides tremendous value to the user, but I found it a bit difficult to find the entry points to the feature. There are two entry points, which are in the “Your Dashboard” section and another in the notifications tab. Providing more entry points to the feature could increase the engagement of the platform tremendously.
Onboarding experience required effort
When onboarding for this feature, I found that there were quite a bit of steps before I could make it to the landing page. The longer it takes for the user to make it to the landing page, the less likely they will finish activating the feature. While analyzing various onboarding experiences of different apps, I noticed that the average amount of steps that I took before getting onto landing page were about 2-3 steps.
I took a step back to assimilate all the information from my user research and get an understanding of what specific aspects of the feature needs further improvement. I noticed that users were not satisfied with the guidance that the onboarding process provides and they were also a bit confused on how they could receive value from this tool. I decided to formulate my direction and focus solely on redesigning the career advice onboarding experience of the feature.
Establishing the Product Strategy
How might an onboarding experience empower and inspire the user prior to them utilizing Career Advice?
I kept this question in the back of my mind, while also trying to figure out a logical method to solve these problem. I think it’s important to excite and inspire the user to use Career Advice during the onboarding experience. In essence, one of the key factors in increasing the activation of a feature is by improving an onboarding experience.
After brainstorming my observations and the questions above, I came up with these three principles to guide my process:
Proposed Solutions
Career Advice Onboarding Experience V.1
Once I created mockups for V.1 of the Career Advice onboarding experience, I tested it on a few users and this is what I found:
There were still 4+ steps until the user was able to make it to the Career Advice Hub, which does not align with the main goal of making the onboarding experience quicker.
It described how we will get them setup but it didn’t go into depth on how this will provide value. Essentially, there was a quick description on the welcoming page but it described what the product is, not it’s value.
The participants felt like the diagram in the the welcoming page were the people that they would be assigned too. The participants felt confused with the choice of profile pictures in the welcoming page.
The layout of the UI was centered and it did not fit the overall feel/look of the Linkedin Mobile Application. An apparent example of this is the the centered text, which is not how we typically align texts in an onboarding experience here at Linkedin.
