Key insights from a post by the CEO of LinkedIn

In a recent post Jeff Weiner, CEO - LinkedIn asked: If you could improve one thing about the LinkedIn user experience, what would it be?

When I first saw this request from Jeff Weiner, I thought I’m the best guy to respond to it. After all, I'm someone who uses LinkedIn extensively, across desktop and mobile (Android), and usually both in a single day depending on whether I am in office, on the road, or at home.

I saw the post around a few days later after Jeff posted it, and by that time 900 comments had already been made on the post. Fast forward by a few days, by the time I got to publish this post, there were over 1650 comments on his question. So, before responding to Jeff, I thought let me read through some comments to get a sense of what people are saying. The more I read, certain trends started to emerge and I realized that a lot of people faced very similar issues to what I did.

This prompted me to do a small exercise and analyze all the 900 comments posted in the first 24 hours. My core motivations behind doing this exercise were:

· My love for the platform combined with a penchant for visualizing data and deriving insights

· To determine whether my gut feeling about top issues would align to what I find out?

· Figure out if there were things that people want, that LinkedIn may not do (for whatever reason), which can then be developed as a standalone product…by me? :)

Based on the most requested changes, here are the top 7 insights that I derived, supported by some sample customer comments:

1) People deeply care about their privacy and spam – "Remove anonymous profile views" feature request tops the charts. Honestly, this didn’t come as a surprise considering that "Who's Viewed Your Profile" is probably the most viewed page on LinkedIn, combined with the fact that most people are either very curious and/or paranoid about privacy. However, it was interesting to read how users expressed their feelings when talking about this feature: insecure, insulted, creepy, like someone's stalking them, and lack of transparency were repeated often. Category: Profile - Supporting comments:

1. Don't allow anonymous users to view profiles. You wouldn't allow an anonymous person in your house so why let them be able to stalk you here?

2. Stop anonymous views or at least give users the right to block anonymous views. It's cyber stalking and distinctly creepy. It you went to a business meeting and someone hid under the table and took notes about you you'd be rightly annoyed, why is this any different!

2) People like control  – The frame of mind of a user visiting LinkedIn is very different from when he’s visiting other social networks. He’s here to make the most of the time spent on the site, get stuff done, learn something new, be productive, grow his business etc. So it really annoys him to spend a lot of time sifting through content he doesn't care about. I think the effort that LinkedIn is putting to predict what a user might like, is futile, as the demand for letting users control what they want to see is very strong. Category: Newsfeed -Supporting comments:

1. The ability to customize the home page the way *I* want it, not the way LinkedIn 'thinks' I want it.

2. Content control. I find using LinkedIn has become more mentally taxing due to the excess unimportant content. People sharing photos, and useless quizzes. It feels like moving from professional to semi-professional.

3. PLEASE let us control what we see in our feed. If you have a lots of connections (which I assume is what you want) then our feeds are way way over cluttered with all the new connections our connections have. I have (unfortunately) stopped using LinkedIn as much because my feed is just bloated with things I don't care about.... So give us control. PLEASE. :)

3) People compartmentalize, segregate and don't prefer to mix things up – LinkedIn is a professional network, and people don’t want it to turn into a Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp etc. A lot of comments suggest that users are very keen to help LinkedIn maintain the core value proposition of the platform by reporting / flagging any inappropriate content (profiles, companies, posts). Category: Newsfeed - Supporting comments:

1. LinkedIn is not FB, Whatsapp or Twitter and it's losing its business networking focus

2. LinkedIn's image as a business / professional platform must be maintained. LinkedIn must not allow people posting ads for sex toys, pizzas and stupid quiz stuff.

3. Remove any fake profiles, scammers, etc. This could be the best thing, and this is what I see as linked-in killer as more and more I think I am wasting my time because of too much of them around.

4. Add to the Terms & Conditions that if you share random inspirational quotes or math problems your profile will be deleted.

4) People expect a consistent user experience across platforms – Given that majority of the users started their LinkedIn journey on the web and are now fast moving to mobile devices, they're expecting to have the same experience across these platforms (includes features, design, usability, synchronization etc.) LinkedIn’s mobile apps have made good progress, but have still kept the users wanting for more. Category: Mobile - Supporting comments:

1. The mobile experience can be bumpy vs. browser

2. Significant improvements to currently pretty awful and slow Android app.

3. Consistency of experience across devices (I find the iPad app terrible to use)

4. View sent messages on the app.

5. The app should allow you to add a personal message when adding a contact

6. Able to remove/block users via mobile app

5) People want to come back to things – Unlike content shared on more ephemeral sites like Snapchat, Twitter or Facebook - the content shared on LinkedIn, tends to have a direct business impact to a user. Hence a lot of people need an easy way to tag / bookmark / search and refer to things they may have read before. A user could also curate a list of posts that they can include in their profile or share with their connections to build their credibility, showcase interests, online contributions etc. Category: Newsfeed - Supporting comments:

1. Make it easy to find old posts, old invites, old content. LinkedIn constantly buries content once posted, it's frustrating.

2. I frequently find myself skimming through headlines between meetings or in lines, etc. I'd love to be able to flag content so I can easily find it to read later!

3. You can't search LinkedIn articles. I read so many great articles on LinkedIn that I can never later reference.

6) People don't like change – It’s extremely difficult to change user habits. It’s one thing when you change a button here, a screen there…but when the entire UI undergoes an overhaul, it does take some time even for the most savvy users to get used to. Unfortunately, the new web UI has not struck a chord with most users, and there were tons of requests to simply switch back to the old UI. Category: Newsfeed - Supporting comments:

1. What happened to hover in the new UI? Hover was awesome. RIP Hover.

2. Although I love changes and improvements, the new user interface is just not as good as was the previous one. Too many functions are hidden in the upper part of the homepage.

3. Absurd UX flows!! Someone wants to connect with me, I get a notification in the header, I accept. I would now like to view their profile. I click on name in the notification and am sent to some fancy data about how my profile is ranking. Worse, the person I just connected with is nowhere to be seen to click on. We use Facebook, habitually. There are some UX heuristics that are ingrained from that use. Either LinkedIn completes revamps it’s UI/UX to rewrite the rules like Snapchat, or they give attention to these UX habits and not try to run against them. Had to get that out, thanks for asking such a pertinent question!

7) People like buckets – With an ever expanding professional network both in the online and offline world, there’s a strong desire for users to have an easy and flexible way to manage their contacts. This includes create folders, groups, add notes, auto tag connections, by company, by profession, nationality, gender etc.) Category: Connections - Supporting comments:

1. Being able to rolodex all my contacts (connections) easily via name, family name, company, industry, country, city, job title.

2. The Connections search function is clunky and not intuitive. It defaults to messages rather than just letting you search a specific person.

3. Create your own personal groups and clusters to share info with, like grouping LinkedIn connections by their industry like education or entertainment, or more specifically elementary or tech education, and animation or editing. And then to see them as a list in a window and change that list around, even print it or export it.

4. Allow us to search for connections by gender and nationality (incredibly needed for the GCC markets).

8) Bonus insight - All said and done, People Love LinkedIn!!

Other frequent requests included:

1. Add text/audio/video chat functionality

2. Ability to see when the persons last logged in / online / offline status.

3. Improve search across the board (contacts, posts, pulse, jobs etc.)

4. Better job recommendations

5. Remove endorsements

6. Better notifications

7.  Revamp messaging UX

8.  Edit posts / comments already published

9. Improve customer service

10. Simplify pricing

And to balance out the heavy stuff, here are some folks being creative and funny:

1.  Make me CEO .... :)

2.  I'll send you an invoice for my idea, clearly a no brainer move for LinkedIn.

3.  Birthday calendar and ''Cake'' would be superb!

4.  I just would add "skip all" and "I'm done " buttons immediately after starting Linkedin

5.  Ask drivers to shower more often....wait my bad....thought you were asking how to improve my Uber experience

In closing, would like to thank Jeff for initiating this dialogue with the users, and building a great professional network.

You can check out what we are building at Quorg HQ or you can follow me on LinkedIn / Twitter

Disclaimer: Above is a point in time snapshot of user feedback, and does not claim completeness or accuracy. All user comments are theirs', posted as-is, and I do not claim any rights on them. Original repost from Vikram.