Unlocking the Potential of Collaborative Articles: Clear Mechanics, Calls to Action, and Navigation

LinkedIn has been attempting to drive traffic to their collaborative article feature and get more users involved in the writing process. In an Oct 2023 article, they cited 74% growth in articles read by members in the previous month and referred to the feature as the "fastest growing traffic driver to LinkedIn."

So why are they so buried? Much like the Games feature which had no entry points when they launched, the collaborative articles are difficult to find, and, when you do find them, the landing page has no calls to action and limited clarity on the mechanics of the Top Voice badge incentive.

In this article, I cover the importance of calls to action, the incentivization contributing to collaborative articles feature, and the continuing struggle to navigate to the feature. To resolve this, the new features I propose are presented with a detailed wireframe—plus insights on the value and process of wireframing—for a revised landing page for collaborative articles that solves almost all of my desires as a content creator in the articles ecosystem.

Navigating to Collaborative Articles

I have pointed out when LinkedIn launched their games feature, that it is difficult to actually find this feature on the site without a bookmark.

The weekly activity tracker is the only persistent place on LinkedIn where you can enter collaborative articles. The others are function to drive traffic to specific articles to make contributions, they aren't reliable ways to navigate to the feature.

Coming in from the activity tracker, a user will find themselves on the landing page for collaborative articles highlighting the next issue: the lack of call to action.

What is a Call to Action?

In usability design and marketing, a call to action is a something that prompts a user to take action.

"Something" is usually a button or link that will facilitate the action you want a user to take. But it can also be pure text depending on the medium. It is typically the most, or one of the most, prominent elements on screen. On screens with multiple buttons, the primary CTA will often be a different color.

LinkedIn tends to use a blue button with white text for their most prominent CTAs on a variety of screens and not all screens have a CTA. This is because not all screens are as insistent about driving a behavior (such as the feed). But most will.

CTAs usually attempt to cut through some of the other visual noise on screen and attract attention. They visually guide a user to the desired action thus lowering the ability barrier to take that action making it more likely the behavior will occur.

Collaborative Articles Landing Page

The landing page for collaborative articles does not have a singular CTA. There are interactive elements but none of them are particularly high priority visually.

To make matters worse there is neither invitation nor incentivization to edit NOR are relevant topics being surfaced to users. The list of articles shown here is based on what was recently edited not based on what might be relevant to a user. Despite having data that they use to invite people to edit articles, the list of topics on the right is generic.

In short, this page does not drive any user behaviors with calls to action, relevant topics to browse, or incentivization to add contributions.

Incentivization

Why should I contribute to these articles in the first place? Last year, I began contributing because I was trying to grow my presence on LinkedIn and attract potential new clients. Articles about the topics suggested that SEO was driving traffic to these articles and I wanted to participate enough to potentially drive traffic to my own LinkedIn page. There was also a badge to be earned I wouldn't mind getting my hands on.

One day, I left a contribution that happened to receive a large amount of reaccs. I don't even remember what this contribution was nor do I have any way of locating it (more on that later). As a result of this entry, I quickly earned myself a Top Voice badge in Game Design.

LinkedIn has two separate Top Voice badges. The blue badge is for content creators with large followings who are influential in their fields. You can see one on the profile of games industry influencer Amir Satvat. The gold badge on the other hand is earned for making contributions to the collaborative articles. You can see one on my profile at the time of writing this article.

The badge is a great reward on LinkedIn. It instantly communicates expertise right at the top of the profile and therefore is highly coveted. As an incentive, it's one of the best ones LinkedIn could have used. Much like a follower count, it is a representation of clout.

Despite being a valuable incentive, it is deeply flawed in its lack of transparency making it difficult for users to understand how to gain and maintain the badge.

How is the gold badge earned?

If you click on the badge on my profile, it will open a modal explaining that "People on LinkedIn find Heather Arbiter a noteworthy contributor to collaborative articles in the following skill. Badges are reassessed every 60 days. Learn more."

• Learn more goes to an article on the blue top voices badge but at least that links to the gold article.
• "Our members will appreciate contributions that share unique experience, expertise, or stories. If you have a badge for more than one skill, you will retain the badge for all skills for which you remain among the most noteworthy contributors in the 60 day period for that skill."

From this language, we know that 60 days is important but it is unclear how it is evaluated. Are they only counting contributions made in the last 60 days? Or do they just remove the badge after re-evaluating the rankings? How high do I have to rank? How am I doing now? Then "members appreciate" which is not a metric! The metric being used is number of reaccs (Like, Support, Love, Insightful, Laugh, Celebrate) on a comment. Why isn't this being communicated clearly and directly?

And nowhere in that help section does it mention the 3 article requirement...

Who does the gold badge incentivize?

Obviously, I would love to be a Top Voice in Gamification but I have made significantly less contributions to this topic in which I am indeed extremely qualified to comment on. However, I'm far from the only person with opinions on the topic. This gamification article I have bookmarked to one day contribute to has 89 contributions at the time of this writing. Some of them are fellow experts and some of them are just folks who read a book on gamification. Because of the mechanics ranking and surfacing by number of reaccs, later participation would be significantly disadvantaged in the rankings and surfacing on the article no matter how quality the contributions are.

Only the top contributors can earn the badge. Once the article has a few contributors, new contributors become buried under the fold of a Load more contributions button meaning they will be even less likely to receive the reaccs.

LinkedIn could help with some of this by showing more contributors, showing the headlines of contributors, and inviting users to unfurl their contributions based on that, or shuffling some of the contributions on various page loads so more are surfaced.

This issue, with only motivating top performers, is one the most common flaws in attempts to use leaderboards: if you're not moving up, attempting to retain a high rank, or in the top ranks, the leaderboards are not only lacking motivation but they can be downright demotivating.

Gold Badge Transparency and Progress

If I have made the required 3 contributions and have gotten some reaccs on them, I will see this at the top of the articles on this subject. This is helpful in communicating goal proximity but "quality contributors" continues to be vague. It is also buried in the articles so until I've found the article to consider, I don't have this incentivizing me to add more on the subject or highlighting what subjects are close.

Again, how am I being measured for my contributions? What does it mean "usually?" Why can't I know the exact criteria? If LinkedIn wants me to do this, why aren't they communicating how this process works??

MY Contributions

So I noted above, that today I don't know what the contribution I made was that got so much attention. I can't review it and consider how to replicate that success in other areas. I can't see if anyone else has contributed something else valuable. In fact, I have NO idea what articles I've already contributed are at all let alone which ones are doing well. The only insight I have is the ephemeral notification when someone leaves a new reacc on my contribution.

THIS DRIVES ME CRAZY!

This one I can't claim is a widespread problem for all content creators. Some people may not care what their past actions are. But me? I like seeing what I've done. One of my favorite little Pride rewards is scrolling back through what I've already written.

Confession time: Part of why I created a newsletter was to be able to scroll through my #FeatureFriday content and appreciate the volume of my efforts. This is how I recognize my own journey towards mastery. I do something similar when I write documentation, scrolling up and down to appreciate my own work. This is an example of the pride mechanism and several other gamification drivers at work.

A New Landing Page Proposal

I submit that many of these issues can be solved with a new landing page for the collaborative articles section. Rather than give you more to read, I instead crafted a medium-high fidelity wireframe with my proposal.

• Add collaborative articles to the top nav

• Create a landing page with a strong CTA to contribute to reusing the CTA widget from the top of the feed.
• Add links to topics relevant to the user (using the same logic that locates experts and recommends articles to contribute to)

• Give much more transparency on Gold Badge mechanics with indicators for progress on all the topics you've contributed to

• Allow for a history of contributions to be accessed and sorted by date or reaccs.
• Create a new incentive by adding the analytics as a "score." These would help show contributors that their contributors are actually driving traffic to their profiles and contributing to their LinkedIn presence. This could backfire however if this isn't actively occurring. But if that's the case, there should be a reconsideration of the way contributions are shown and surfaced as they should be supporting the contributors.

Communicating in Wireframes

I frequently use this level of fidelity on wireframes because it helps me determine what the right information density is on a screen and communicate the relative importance of screen elements. It also lets me recommend styling associated with desired functionality and communication This type of wireframe doesn't have the exact fonts, styles, colors, or pixel-perfect spacing but it's close enough to demonstrate that it is appropriate for the site/app it is being proposed for.

After I complete such a wireframe, this might go directly to stakeholders to approve, users to test, or product design to iterate on. Engineering will weigh in on technical requirements and limitations (for example, where we might want pagination links instead of infinite scrolls).

In this particular wireframe, elements in blue represent clickable links/objects that aren't otherwise self-apparent. Black text on the annotations represents the questions each section is meant to help answer for a user (a means of expressing a user story). Red text is meant to provide clarification on the implementation for developers and specify where links go. One new icon at the top was from Noun Project created by Creative Iconix. The wireframe was created entirely in Figma.

Metric Improvements

As with many #FeatureFriday entries, the primary metric I use for designing these features is my personal opinion on how good a user experience it is. This isn't a valid metric for a product manager working on the feature who actually has insight into the goals and performance of a feature, but it does allow me the greatest amount of freedom to describe how I would personally like to improve something in the imaginary land of #FeatureFridays.

That being said, here are some quantitative metrics that would also likely be improved with this design:

• More users contribute to collaborative articles because they will be guided to it and better incentivized
• Increased amount of topics users contribute to because they can find more topics
• Increased followers of topics due to increased discoverability
• More repeat engagement of the users who already have gold badges because they can find more places to contribute
• Increased user feedback on the article quality (rate this article module at the bottom of the articles) which will hopefully lead to pruning of lower quality articles.

Conclusion

The new easy-to-navigate-to landing page for collaborative articles will help answer a lot of questions from users and improve how users interact with the collaborative articles feature:

• How do I find this feature?
• What should I do with this feature?
• Where should I make contributions?
• What have I contributed?
• What have been my most valuable contributions?
• What topics might I want to browse?
• How are my contributions helping ME?
• When are badges reassessed?
• How do I earn a badge?
• What is my progress towards earning a badge?
• What categories have I made progress in?

There's a lot more to improve on the articles themselves. Namely the vapidity and repetitiveness of much of the content that is a hallmark of AI-generated content. There are numerous articles about the same topics (ex: how do you deal with conflict and prioritize, how to handle delays, how to collaborate remotely) that in different sections without much added value. Other articles attempt to generalize concepts that are incredibly case-specific giving little value to the contents.

What's truly missing is a way for editors to change the AI-generated content and create new articles on topics that are actually valuable. Wikis are already providing a model for collaborative content creation to consider.

Heather Arbiter is a Top Game Design Voice and Top Game Development Voice on LinkedIn thanks to the positive reception to her contributions to collaborative articles on the subjects of Game Design and Game Development. She's made an entirely unknown number of contributions to collaborative articles thanks to the lack of transparency in this area. While pursuing a Masters in Game Design & Development, Heather's independent study was in the use MediaWiki structures could serve to optimize collaborative content editing and management for game design documentation. Heather is a Product Manager and Games/Gamification Designer.

#FeatureFriday is a biweekly newsletter about the intersection of product, gamification, and behavior written with a personal touch. This is the 23rd edition of the series.