Top Five Needed Changes to Improve UX on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become an invaluable tool for those with professional careers. Most of us use it everyday or receive eMail from it. Just as with most websites, it could be better.

From a UX perspective, I list the top five changes LinkedIn needs:

1) Darker and Scalable Fonts in eMails

We see this light font colours (Silver or grey) used on white background far too often! This is typically a design decision by a visual designer who is both young and has great vision. Granted, it may look good but it is not user friendly for those with poor eyesight or colour blind. My guess is, their attitude would be similar to my arrogant attitude when I was young and did the same, "Your old, get some glasses..."

To make things worse, the eMail font size cannot be scaled in OSX Mail. (Not sure about other eMail clients.)

LinkedIn should increase the font size, make it much darker and allow the eMails to be scalable.

2) Bring Back Hover Information on Users, With Location

It used to be the hover pop-up information on people was in consistent and should have been addressed. e,g, In some locations it popped up, in others it didn't. Admittedly, the hover could be annoying but this could have been overcome by implementing a 300ms hover to trigger.

Initially, LinkedIn chose to remove the location of people from the hover. That was one of the primary reasons I used the hover. Now, hover information has been removed from almost everywhere. In my mind, this is a poor decision.

LinkedIn should bring the hover pop-up back with the location but incorporating a delayed pop-up.

3) Connection Request Messages

Social media professionals often suggest we should create a custom message when asking someone to connect, to personalise it. However, the process of finding and reading personalised messages is overly burdensome. From the drop-down pop-up, when hovering on the Invitations icon on the top-right, it's not possible to read messages.

LinkedIn should make the messages widely accessible or eliminate them all together. I'm happy to see them go, myself but I'll let others discuss that.

4) Scalable Website When Zooming

If there is one aspect of the Internet which is a constant issue for me, it's scaling fonts. Again, my poor eyesight requires me to zoom into almost every website I go to and thus the Internet is typically a skewed mess. (See header image.)

LinkedIn should ensure its website scales gracefully so all users can use it as designed. Start with a minimum font size equivalent to 16px and work from there as users can always scale down and still use the website.

5) Better Stream Filter

The Home page stream is now limited to Most Active and Most Recent content; those options are almost hidden. Previously users could apply more filters to control what they see. i.e. My updates, Jobs, and a couple of others.

LinkedIn should allow users more control of what is in our stream. Items which are of no interest are just "noise". Internet users are already bombarded with too much noise, helps us remove some of it.

Bonus: I Don't Need to Know When I Participate in the Stream

When we, Like or Share, we don't need to know there is a new item in the stream. In-fact I don't need to even see my participation in the stream at all. When users receive a notification there are new items in the stream, I am certain they expect those items are from other users.

LinkedIn should stop notifying users their posts are in the stream.

But I'm Not an Expert...

PS: What would you like to see changed?