BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY

Low share and growth contribution (5%) by content search towards the site-wide engagement

Search results page is one of the “top of funnel” surface across LinkedIn’s platforms, where members can discover different types of content, people, jobs and engage with them. Search contributed actions is a metric that tracks this engagement for every kind of result. There was a significant gap in contributions of the search originated actions for content i.e. articles compared to the overall site wide actions. Hence there was a strong push from leadership to explore this opportunity. LinkedIn’s goal that year was also to empower content creators and pushing for engaging content experience was an important goal.

MEMBER PROBLEM

High barrier to contribution and difficult to find relevant content search results

In addition to measured low engagement rate of 5% for content search results, we also gathered some qualitative feedback from an in-product, feedback tool about the existing content search experience as follows -

TARGET USER GROUPS

Going back to the basics

Before diving into work, it was important to revisit who our target users were and their needs on the platform specifically. In addition to end users, we also had an in-house Editorial team that heavily leveraged the content search experience to research LinkedIn’s News section on the platform. My PM set up a meeting with the editorial team to observe their workflows and gather any detailed feedback about the current experience. Using this as the input, I came up with two types of target user groups for whom we were going to design the experience -

design tenets

Design principles for guidance

After going through the qualitative feedback, distilling the user needs and auditing the pain points of the existing experience, next step was a FigJam session with my Product Manager to come up with design principles that were going to guide us in the decision making process. I also shared these with Search’s Product leadership during a design critique session to gather any feedback and ensure we were aligned on the common goal.

APPROACH

Remote design sprint to ideate, test and inform product direction

We planned a design sprint to invite multiple stakeholders from different teams within LinkedIn as there were some dependencies and a huge opportunity to learn from one another. We had designers, PM’s, researchers join us from LinkedIn’s Feed, Jobs and Editorial team and share crucial insight about member behavior, design patterns and upcoming related projects on their respective pillars. This helped our design sprint participants get a primer on what behavior can be leveraged and brainstorm solution ideas. We used a voting system to prioritize ideas that I would then take to explore in detail with mocks.

There were multiple iterations and long review sessions that happened with Search’s product and design leadership team to finalize some options that we would want to test. This sprint’s outcome was to test, learn and inform the direction for LinkedIn’s Search experience.

MOBILE EXPERIeNCE

Bottom sheet interface to see post details

Bottom sheet is the most versatile mobile UI pattern that can be leveraged to surface any kind of supplemental information. I chose to use this to surface additional post details because it retains the context of search results and addresses member pain point to be able to to switch back and forth between post cards and details. 

After auditing the different types of posts on LinkedIn, I came up with the skeleton contents of a bottom sheet as follows - 

• Actor information

• Body text

• Media (image, video, 3rd party articles, embedded post, polls )

• Engagement information (likes and comments count)

• Comment bar

• Comments

• Building edges by discovering new hashtags to follow

During the execution phase of the sprint, I came up with 5 different concepts, each with variations of actor, content and action bar placement. I also identified that there’s an opportunity for content explorers to dive deeper into related topics by surfacing discovery of hashtags. I presented the following options to Search’s product and design leadership team for feedback on design direction.

For user testing, we decided to move ahead with Option 1 because UI wise it resembled the feed content experience the most, leveraging member’s existing mental model. Additionally, from engineering perspective, we wanted to leverage existing code to minimize the level of effort.

DESIGN DETAILS

Perfecting the mobile experience

Diving deeper into designs, I worked on defining the engagement interactions such as like, comment and sharing posts on the bottom sheet surface. I was going to test the following concepts from a usability perspective.

An immersive and scalable bottom sheet

I designed the anatomy of the bottom sheet to ensure it scaled to fit +6 variations of embedded objects. The information hierarchy was to always lead with the Actor lockup and edge creation action, followed by the actor commentary, embedded object (dynamic), actions bar and then towards the end, commentary.

During the design of the sheet, I aligned with LinkedIn’s Feed design team on this layout to maintain consistency for how content is consumed on LinkedIn.

DESIGN DOCUMENTATION

Communicating designs

There were 3 levels of interfaces that were layered on top of one another. It was important to document this properly and ensure the interactions were clear for implementation purposes. 

To learn how above designs translated into web experience and this project’s outcome, please email me at rusheka91@gmail.com

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