Mar 17 2008
LinkedIn Mobile UI improvements needed
I recently tweeted:
sethyates linkedin UI sucks on a mobile - both mobile ui and web ui
Steve Ganz (from LinkedIn) promptly replied:
steveganz @sethyates, what can we do to make it better?
BTW - looks like the timestamps in Twitter are local to the sending user (I’m in Australia, he’s in California), hence why he replied to me before I tweeted 
Well, a proper response wouldn’t fit into a 140 character tweet, so here goes in a blog post:
First, I use LinkedIn quite often and would love to use it on my BlackBerry Pearl when on the road/away from the laptop, but the UI when rendered on a mobile (either using www.linkedin.com or m.linkedin.com) just doesn’t do it for me. These improvements would help me and fit my use case, maybe they wouldn’t fit the majority cases. Disclaimer over, here’s my list:
mobile UI (m.linkedin.com)
- The home page (after logging in) is simply a Search box. Now, the time I spend searching in LinkedIn is rather limited so this isn’t really an appropriate home screen. Here’s what I want to see here: let me set my status (”What are you working on?”, contacts’ status updates and inbox/action items (Invitations, Accepted Invitations, Recommendation requests, In Mail, etc). It’d also be nice to know some of the connection stats from the www home page (# connections, network size, new people in network since X date, # views of profile, etc).
- I manage a group that gets several new member requests a day. There’s no way to manage the group using this UI.
- The contacts page only has next/previous, and starts on A-C surnames. If I want to get the contact details of a Contact with a surname starting with M-O, I’m many clicks away. Add a quicker way for me to get to another page. Move the Search box from the home page here.
- Once I’ve found a contact, you don’t display their contact details like you do on the www UI. Sometimes I just want to grab their email address (yes I know you have “Send a Message”, but often I want to contact them from my email account directly).
- On the contact’s profile, perhaps start out showing an abbreviated experience listing (e.g., don’t show details - I often don’t need to see that and am happy to click again if I want to see the experience details).
Web UI on the mobile (www.linkedin.com)
- Only one comment really: its just a jumble. This is a result of the BB not rendering the stylesheet. To see what it looks like in your browser, run up Firefox with the Web Developer toolbar and disable CSS. Luckily there’s “Skip to content” near the top, because the top several pages is just the menu in list format.
With these tweaks in place, I reckon the LinkedIn Mobile UI would be the ducks nuts.
Related posts
2 Responses to “LinkedIn Mobile UI improvements needed”
Leave a Reply
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 0 people and commented on 0 times hide
Seth, thanks so much for the feedback. I’ve shared this with the rest of the team.
LinkedIn Mobile is in its infancy right now and you can look forward to many, many improvements over the next several months.
Seth - only now getting back into mobile web usage, but yes, right on!
And in general, less clicks to common actions would be welcomed whether via mobile or tethered web interface. Ideally this would be personalizable rather than trying to cut the balance across all users.
Ex: If I always go for a deeper dive into someone’s profile after accepting an invite, it sure would be nice to just automatically be there after accepting the invite, instead of having to go another click or two.
Add piping status to/from twitter, facebook, etc.
Better group management - ah, the list is endless.
Great to see signs of rolling improvement though - it’s been a long time coming!