Posts and Pulse: What the redesign at LinkedIn means for Authors and Readers

LinkedIn is changing the way you publish posts, and amending the way its Pulse channels appear. And it's not good news.

I take a look at the implications for you as an author and as a reader, and show you what the new design looks like.

1: Changes for the Reader

The image below (Image 1) shows the new Pulse home page. Rather than a list of stories on the left, and actual stories on the right, this is a complete change. Stories appear inline, with full width graphics.

Image 1 - The 'new' Pulse channel view

Compare this with the older format, shown below. This is the format which, at time of writing, many LinkedIn users will still be seeing.

Image 2 - The 'old' Pulse Channel View

Locating additional Pulse channels is no longer a question of choosing from the simple, unobtrusive dropdown menu at the top - you've go to scan down past several stories, and some enticements to follow media branded channels, and then click through on a fairly subtle text link to get there.

Image 3

This seems pretty retarded. As for me, I've already bookmarked the destination page https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/discover to save me having to do this.

Removing the ability to easily reach and discover new content is perverse. And taking away the ability to swap to the channel I want to view is even worse.

You can't in effect, choose a Pulse Channel to view. You're stuck with a generic default view which can't be customised, filtered or sorted in any way. So I've already started to use my browser bookmarks to get to the Channels I want to see, which is about as retrograde as it gets.

When a User Interface takes useful options away from you and makes getting quickly to precisely what you want to see more difficult, it's odd to consider it an improvement.

The page show in Image 3 above is from an early preview of the new features, so we can only assume that the Oil & Energy channel has now moved away from focusing on robots and fast food.

When you click through to read a story, you no longer have a list of other posts that might interest you at left. You are simply reading one post with no distractions from that, and the only other choices you are presented with only come at the bottom of the post.

Image 4 - New interface at the bottom of a post

If the author of the post you're reading has more than a few posts to their name, their articles will be the choices offered - but at random, not sequentially, and not necessarily the latest ones published. If it's the author's only article, other authors' work will be offered up.

The good news is that your older posts might get read all the way through, and can have a longer shelf life. The bad news is your latest post might not get an airing.

At the time of my initial review, and at today's date of 9th June, the promised blue button linking to Discover more stories leads instead to the LinkedIn Home Page. I did give this specific feedback to LinkedIn in writing a few weeks ago. Oops.

A quite radical change is that readers can no longer see how many views a story has had. As a reader, you can only see the number of likes and the number of comments on a post. So you have no idea if the story you're reading has been seen by one person or one hundred thousand. Only the author can see this information by examining the post's stats.**

** Actually, there is a way to see how many views a post has had - read on to the end to find out. It's a bit clunky, but it works.

2: Changes for the Author

In terms of creating and editing your posts, it's all much the same. However, your body text on screen is a sans-serif font, which obscurely, is not what readers will see. They (currently) see the same mix of sans-serif fonts for 'h1' and 'h2' headlines, and serif text for the bulk of the body text. This is a very odd discrepancy which means you can't really be sure how your final text is going to look when published. Surely this must change, as there's no logic there at all. 

Your header image is still recommended to be an optimum of 700 x 400 pixels, although the width of body text when published is now closer to 750 pixels. So uploading an oversized image at at least 750 x 428 pixels would actually make more sense to avoid your images appearing pixelated. 

But when you upload a large image which may be over 1000 pixels wide into the body of the text, it gets cut back to around 700 pixels in width on upload, which appears to match the display width of the editor, but does not match the display width of the final post. It's cut short, and floats uselessly in the centre of the screen. If you've got the new reader interface, you'll see it affecting all the images in this article.

You still have three possible tags to use from those in the LinkedIn database to add to your story. (Although bizarrely, I just read an article with four different tags).

It's my hope that, perhaps one day, we'll be able to choose to browse and read posts by using these tags, rather than stumbling across a topic (or tag) that may interest you when it appears after you've read an article, and you click through to find more. Maybe in the next iteration.

There's a big disconnect here, because when you click to follow what LinkedIn describes as a topic at the bottom of a story tag (or topic), it first checks whether you have that as a skill, and lists some people who do have that skill. But if you follow that logic, and try to add one of your skills to an article, it doesn't use the same data set to allow you to choose from. So you can't highlight your skills. But maybe some you can. Just start typing and see if you get lucky. Tag, topic skill, it's all a bit of a mess really.

When you publish, thankfully, nothing much has altered. You still get the same prompts to promote your post on Twitter and Facebook. But of course, the body font abruptly changes to serif, and your line lengths all change.

The size and cropping of the images to illustrate your other articles appearing at the end of your posts does not use the full frame of the images, but rather a central 'postbox' - so a different approach to header image design is needed for authors, especially for text-based graphics, to avoid crucial details being cut off.

The 'Follow' button to allow you to follow an author appears at the end of the article, and you can now once again click a link there to view all of an author's posts on LinkedIn. A Follow button, and like, comment and share buttons also all remain visible as you scroll down the post, as seen in Image 5 below, although there are no text tips to describe the function of these graphics.

Image 5

In Summary: It's a dog's breakfast

I don't think there's any improvement here. Quite the opposite in fact.

1. It's more difficult to find channels.
   (As a challenge - try to find the LinkedIn Tips Pulse Channel, and tell me how much time scrolling and how many mouse clicks you need to make to get there. Tip - only do this if you're happy to click more than five times)
2. You have to use bookmarks or the 'back' button to get to a chosen channel after you choose to read a story in that channel.
3. You have to use bookmarks or the 'back' button to change channel.
4. Your draft text doesn't look the same as the finished article - it uses a different font family altogether.
5. Image sizes are inconsistent, and a central 'postbox' view has to be considered to make your header graphic fully legible as a thumbnail - and there are no guidelines for the position of this postbox - which could readily be shown when you first upload your header image.
6. There is no ability to simply browse Pulse Channels until after you have scrolled down through 12 stories and got past three suggestions for branded publishers channels.
7. The branded channels can't actually be previewed - the links related to them point to company pages on LinkedIn. So by following, I'm not sure if I'm actually following a Company Page or a Pulse Channel. (Or is it perhaps a topic or a tag?)
8. The default Pulse view shows publications and channels that I'm not interested in and do not follow. And I can't alter that. Talk about the definition of being annoying and time-wasting!
9. Pulse Channels scroll on endlessly back in time. And there's still no simple "search posts" feature other than the one that requires two clicks to activate in the general search bar.
10. When I search posts, I can see how many people have viewed a post - information otherwise hidden from me. This information also appears (at time of writing) on my Author's Page.
11. On the positive side, author stats and analytics appear unchanged.

Image 6 - The new obscure way to see how many views an article has had

I'm not impressed with the changes made to Publishing and to Pulse.

• Very little has improved, and a lot has got worse from the point of view of being an author and a reader.

Frankly, it sucks. It looks and feels unfinished - and with UI gaps that make me think the team working on this has spent every morning drinking heavily before starting work, and that the project has had no strategy, direction or supervision.

That may sound very harsh, but I've published over 140 articles on LinkedIn since March 2014, and I am sitting here looking at what's provided here in front of me, and it's really, really not good. 

• What do you think? Has the new look arrived for you yet?

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David Petherick writes LinkedIn profiles for a living. He is Director of First Impressions at Amazes.Me and Consultant Surgeon at Doctor LinkedIn. David makes your online presence visible, legible and credible. Follow him on Twitter at @petherick or click the 'Follow' button for LinkedIn updates.