Final Design
Overcome the barriers for novice contributors to share on LinkedIn
Solo Project
Figma, Sketch, Adobe Photoshop, ScreenFlow
UX designer, UX researcher and prototyper
Jan. 17, 2019 - Jan. 21, 2019 (5 Days)
LinkedIn enables professionals to be more productive and successful by helping them stay informed and build meaningful relationships. A productive content ecosystem relies on a healthy balance of content contributors and consumers that share and learn knowledge about their industries, careers and professional interests. For many members, however, it feels scary or risky to contribute to the platform since their actions are tied to their professional identities.
Task: Design an experience that helps novice contributors overcome the barriers to sharing.
My design process consist of:
I started decoding the design prompt by asking a few questions below. These questions can help me clarify the area that I want to gather insights from in the user research.
Based on my initial questions and thoughts on why users consume or contribute on LinkedIn, I designed a 13 questions user survey, and received 22 valid responses. The survey is sent to a wide variety of LinkedIn users.
Only 22.7% users rarely (less than once a month) consume LinkedIn Feeds (Read, like, comment, and share), and everyone have consumed Linked Feeds before.
On the other hand, 81.8% of users rarely or never post LinkedIn Feeds. So these users fit perfectly as my target users, novice contributors, who have consumed content on LinkedIn but not contributing contents.
The survey is aiming for giving a general understanding of my target users, novice contributor, and learning their barriers to sharing contents on LinkedIn. Below are my survey results:
Having all the survey results, I recruited 3 users from the survey to conduct more in-depth user interviews through Google Hangouts. These users all fall into the group of novice contributor, but they have different concerns and pain points.
These user interviews will help me gather insights that I missed from the survey, for example, what are the reasons behind their barriers to share content? What could encourage them to contribute more? What kind of feeds will bring true value to them.
Below are highlights of what they are saying, names and avatars are faked for privacy.
I created an affinity diagram based on all my survey and interview data to organize and visualize my key insights.
The core reason that users don't post on Linkedin can be broke into 4 different pressures:
The first two pressure come from internal and the latter two come from external.
There are three primary reasons that user want to become contributor:
Pressure from limited information and pressure to express myself are connected with gain knowledge, pressure of professional identity are related to career development, and finally pressure from social networking is linked with build connection.
Combined with these 4 pressures and 3 reasons, I created a persona, that can better tell the story, let's meet Annie.
Equipped with the persona and all my research insights, below is my design goal that I want to achieve to help break the barriers for novice contributors.
Before I start to brainstorm and ideate solutions, this typical user generate content problem in a social platform reminds of a book that I have read before, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" by Nil Eyal.
In the book, Nil introduced the hook model, this model describes how businesses can fundamentally change behavior within their users, and create day-to-day habits around their products.
The hook model contains 4 part:
I think hook model could be very helpful when I am brainstorming ideas, because I am trying to establish a routine behavior (contribute contents) for the novice contributors.
So to put his model in our design problem's context.
Taking my design goal in mind along with the hook model, I started to ask HMW questions for ideation.
After analyzing pros and cons for all ideas, I found out there are two ideas that keep popping up in almost all the HMW categories. I want to combine 2 ideas and bring them to life:
I started sketching out key screens that covers the the above features. The screens can be further broke into 6 categories:
I also created user flow for LinkedIn Ask, illustrating how users interact through different screens, and also how this can tie back to our design goal.
Annie is an entry level UX designer with 2 years of working experience. She is passionate about what she does, even though she is currently working in a local startup, she wants to grow to be an influencer in her industry and join a big name company.
Annie likes looking for jobs or browsing for interesting industry articles on LinkedIn mobile. As usual, she surprisingly found out a set of newly designed on-boarding screens shown up on her LinkedIn app, it introduced a new feature called LinkedIn Ask, a new home where you can ask and answer questions within topics that you are interested in. Annie was curious about this new feature and kept swiping, she was guided to select up to three topics she was interested in, Design, Technology and UX Research.
She entered the home page, then she saw a guide inviting her to try out LinkedIn Ask. She clicked into that tab, then she found out she can discover and manage topics that are interesting to her, which is really cool, because she has always found the LinkedIn feed too diverse and not relevant. It is very hard for her to find insightful industry articles and career development tips, those are the things that she found most valuable on LinkedIn.
She explored topics and chose Figma Topic to follow, because that's a UI design tool she recently picked up.
Great! Figma Topic is added to the list, she clicked into Figma Topic and found lots of interesting questions, then, she clicked into one of them and read through the responses. She felt she gained more knowledge about why Figma is better than Sketch in many ways.
Back to the Figma questions list, she got inspired to post a question, "What are some good learning materials to get started on Figma?", because she really wanted to start learning this tool. Also, she didn’t need to worry about her professional identity, because asking questions is anonymous, it's all about sharing and exchanging knowledge. She clicked the ask a question button. The Figma Topic is automatically added to the question, this is awesome! She posted the question, and found out it already shown up in the question list. She couldn't wait to get some responses and actively contribute to this Topic.
Finally, Annie was surprised to find out she could also connect with users who were actively contributing to this topic, this is even better, she can learn from the talents in her industry now. Moreover, questions they have asked and responses they have written are included as part of their profiles. Annie felt very excited to start asking and answering more questions to build up her professional reputation and develop her career.
Because of the time limitation, I don't have time to conduct proper user testing sessions, user testing could help me keep refining my design and there are still lots of areas that need me think through.
This is overall an exciting, exhausted but fully valuable experience, it is always fun to enjoy the entire end-to-end design journey and see how I gradually reach my design goal. Below are a few thing that I learned throughout the process:
