Some of you may have noticed a new site navigation experience on LinkedIn. We are in the process of testing a new design. During this testing phase, some users will see the new design, while others will not.
What’s New
A global navigation bar at the top of the page that provides convenient access to all LinkedIn services.
Simplified local navigation within each of the LinkedIn areas (Profile, Contacts, Groups, etc.).
More room available for page content. Less scrolling.
A cleaner, less-cluttered look.
An easier way to navigate and find information on LinkedIn
We began the redesign effort several months ago by analyzing how people use LinkedIn. We looked at what features people use the most and pored over several years of data from usability research on the site. Armed with this information we began doing design explorations of how to better organize LinkedIn features, and make them more convenient to find and use.
We factored into this effort additional features we knew were coming. We narrowed down the designs to a few candidates we felt were strong contenders. We then prototyped these designs and had users perform tasks with the prototypes in the usability lab. We went through numerous iterations until we arrived at a design we felt worked the best. One of the key features of the new design is that it allows much more space for page content – information about you and your professional network.
We are now doing limited testing of the new design. We are still iterating and would love to hear your feedback! Please consider this blog post one of the many ways to let us know what you think.
Feel free to either leave a comment at the bottom of the page or @linkedin us on twitter as well.
Editor’s note: This blog post is authored by Andrew He, a Stanford student currently completing his Master of Sciences degree in Computer Science. Andrew is a two-time LinkedIn intern, and spent the summer of 2009 focused on the LinkedIn mobile platform.
I suppose this blog post could have been entitled: “What I did on my summer vacation.” Truth be told, I’m just thrilled to see LinkedIn for iPhone v1.5 in the iTunes app store. There’s nothing more gratifying as a developer than to see your work go live.
This past summer, I was able to dedicate myself to enhancing the LinkedIn mobile platform. In the Fall of 2008, I was lucky enough to be one of the first students to take the new CS 193P: iPhone Application Development course at Stanford. I was looking for the opportunity to put that work to good use, and LinkedIn was excited to have me join the mobile team for the summer.
LinkedIn for iPhone v1.5 adds a large number of caching and performance improvements to the original LinkedIn application. For most people, however, the most noticeable change will be the addition of a single new module: Inbox.
The Inbox offers quick and easy access to three key features: Invitations, Messages & Sent Items. The Invitations tab shows you all of your pending invitations, making it easy to quickly accept requests anywhere. The user interface includes the image of the inviter (if available), which makes it that much easier to recognize them. The badge shows you quickly how many pending invitations you have outstanding.
The application also lets you send invitations, either by entering their email address, or by going to their profile and clicking the invitation button.
The messages tab offers quick access to all of of your outstanding messages from your connections. The badge on the tab shows you how many unread messages you have. We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to get through your messages by replying or archiving each item. You can also send a message to any of your LinkedIn connections.
Most internships at high tech startups involve new technologies and cool products. But it’s not everyday that you get to ship a real product like this with the potential to benefit millions of users.
I just want to say a quick thank you to Adam Nash, Jaikumar Ramanathan, and the entire LinkedIn mobile team. There are a lot of exciting improvements to the LinkedIn mobile platform on the way, but for now, I hope the addition of the Inbox will make the LinkedIn iPhone application an even more essential tool for mobile professionals.
If you’re interested in helping us with feedback and suggestions for future versions of the LinkedIn for iPhone application, come join us on the official LinkedIn group.
Download the latest version (v1.5) of LinkedIn’s iPhone app here
I often come across interesting profiles on LinkedIn, but I’ve found it challenging to save profiles so I can easily come back to them later. Usually, I resort to bookmarking the profiles in my web browser or scribbling down names on a piece of paper.
Today we are launching Profile Organizer, a new Premium feature that lets you save profiles, organize them into folders, and add notes. Anytime you find an interesting profile, simply click “Save Profile” and the profile is bookmarked for you within LinkedIn.
When you click “Save Profile”, the profile is added to your Profile Organizer. You now see a module on the profile page from which you can save a profile into a designated folder, add contact information, and private notes that are visible only to you. It’s a great way to remember relevant details about contacts, and develop your relationships.
The Profile Organizer is a workspace accessible through the Contacts tab, where you can manage all of your saved profiles organized into specific folders.
Profile Organizer also lets you save profiles directly from the search results page. With just one click, you can save a profile and add it to a folder directly from search.
If you do many searches on LinkedIn, the single-click “save profile” action can save you time. You no longer need to review each interesting profile in detail: just save from the search results page, and you can narrow down your list in Profile Organizer later.
A few of us at LinkedIn have started using Profile Organizer and find it particularly helpful after attending networking events or conferences. In the past, I collected a stack of business cards and came back from the event unsure about what to do with them. Now, I find the contacts on LinkedIn, and jot down relevant information into Profile Organizer. The next time I go to a similar event, I simply glance through my notes to recall details about our past conversations.
If you have a minute, check out this short feature demo:
Get started using the new feature by clicking on the “Save Profile” link from any LinkedIn profile or search results. Alternatively, you can also check out your Profile Organizer page here.
Profile Organizer is a Premium Account feature, but we are offering a 30-day free trial for all of our members to try it out. Learn more here. We’d love to hear your questions and / or feedback at feedback@linkedin.com. Or follow us @linkedin.
I’m happy to report that as of today, as part of Palm webOS 1.2, the most common feature request from LinkedIn members has now been delivered: seamless syncing of your LinkedIn connections to your Palm Pre, via Palm Synergy. Now every application on the Palm Pre can benefit from the information provided by your LinkedIn network.
The process is incredibly simple:
Make sure that you have received the new webOS 1.2 over-the-air update on your Palm Pre. LinkedIn is only available with Palm webOS 1.2 or later.
Click the “Contacts” application
Select “Preferences & Accounts” from the menu
Click “Add An Account”
Select LinkedIn, and enter your LinkedIn email address and password.
That’s it. You’ll find your address book, available to all applications, is now sync’ed daily with your LinkedIn connections. The following fields will be automatically updated with every connection:
Email address
Title
Company
Photo
In addition to integration with Palm webOS, we’re also pleased to announce that we’ve uploaded the v1.0 of our LinkedIn for Palm Pre application. It features a number of performance improvements, and offers an improved user experience for search, the number one feature for mobile professionals. Now there is even less excuse to walk into a meeting without taking 30 seconds to type in their name and get the full detail about their professional experience.
We appreciate the feedback that you’ve given us on our first Palm Pre application, and we hope you enjoy these improvements. Stay tuned, we’re planning to roll out additional LinkedIn mobile enhancements in the near future.
Ed Brill is the Director of Product Management for Lotus Notes at IBM. He is also a blogger and frequent traveler who loves the integration of TripIt with his LinkedIn Profile. Today’s post is about how IBM is mashing up all of those tools to help make people like Ed more productive.
Millions of business professionals around the world enhance their daily productivity through their use of IBM Lotus Notes. When we delivered Lotus Notes 8, a key objective was to provide a “desktop of the future” — one that could integrate all of the content and information people need to be productive in a single client. Instantly, developers all over the world were building widgets, plug-ins, and extensions to tie together corporate collaboration and user-customized information and content.
This week, IBM and LinkedIn are announcing the availability of the LinkedIn plug-in for Lotus Notes. This easy to use add-in dynamically displays LinkedIn profile, status, and other information in the Notes 8 sidebar. The new plug-in is a great example of “contextual collaboration” — where users access relevant information without having to leave behind what they are already working on.
I am excited about the LinkedIn plug-in for Lotus Notes. It provides a much greater sense of collaboration and connection to the people I interact with every day by instantly increasing my knowledge about the author of e-mails and other content. It leads to interesting discoveries of background, interests, projects, or education. The benefits in improved relationships make this a must-have for Lotus Notes users, and a good reason for you to check out Notes if you’re not already using it.
Hi everyone. My name is Nico Posner, and I am the product manager responsible for our international sites here at LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a global network of over 42 million professionals from every country around the world, with approximately half of our member base outside the United States. Our mission at LinkedIn is to connect the world’s professionals, and we would like to do this in as many languages as possible. A frequent request from our members is to offer the LinkedIn website in their native language. Today, the LinkedIn website is available in four languages: English, Spanish, French and German (we allow users to offer their profiles in over 40 languages), but we’d like to extend that to as many professionals as possible around the globe by offering additional languages.
Currently, we are investigating the best way to translate our site into more languages. Since this is a decision that will impact millions of our users, we wanted to hear from our members on what they thought were some of the most effective ways to make this happen. Fortunately, some of the best professional experts in this area are members of the LinkedIn community, so we were able to leverage their insights through a direct survey. The chart below outlines the responses we got from over 12,000 professionals this past week.
We are happy to see that thousands of members expressed an interest in contributing to the translation of LinkedIn. More importantly, this survey gives us a deeper understanding of what would be of value to the members who expressed interest in bringing LinkedIn into additional languages. These options typify some of the value propositions that members often get from LinkedIn, and we were interested in hearing which ones would be of most interest. You can see the range of responses above. Premium subscription was the most popular choice, followed by recognition on a member’s profile. Requests for direct compensation was the most common response under the “Other” category.
Our survey shows that one of the most important benefits of a community translation effort on LinkedIn would be that a member’s contributions could be highlighted directly on their professional profile. Numerous professionals demonstrate their expertise on LinkedIn every day as a means of enhancing their professional reputation. This effort could extend those benefits to members who work in the translation and localization industry.
We are still in the process of evaluating different options for translating the site into additional languages. Thank you to all of the members who’ve taken time to offer us your valuable feedback.
I’m excited to announce that last weekend marked the launch of a new way for professionals to leverage the power of LinkedIn: our first native application for the Palm Pre. For those of you lucky enough to have purchased a new Palm Pre, you’ll find LinkedIn as one of the free applications immediately available in the Palm Pre application catalog.
For those of you familiar with our iPhone application, you’ll notice that we’ve taken a decidedly different approach with this first version for the Palm Pre. We designed this application from the ground up for the new webOS platform. As a result, you’ll find the application features a simple but elegant set of features that integrate seamlessly into the platform.
With LinkedIn for the Palm Pre, you can easily view up-to-date information about any of your LinkedIn connections. We’ve also seamlessly integrated LinkedIn search into the interface – typing in a name will not only search your connections, but will also reach across the cloud to LinkedIn to search the entire LinkedIn network in the background.
Why walk into any interview, sales call, or client meeting without knowing the details of who you are meeting with? With LinkedIn, you’re able to type that name in a few minutes before the meeting, and walk in an expert.
LinkedIn for Palm Pre also debuts, for the first time, the ability to truly connect on the go. Not only does the new application offer the ability to send invitations, but also a clear and simple inbox to accept invitations.
We know that more and more professionals expect the ability to have the power of their professional networks wherever they go. We’re extremely excited to be a part of the launch of the Palm Pre, and this is one of many exciting new advances in mobile services that we’re planning for 2009.
To learn more, we’ve posted a new page on the LinkedIn website about the whole family of LinkedIn mobile products.
P.S. The most common question we have received to date is, “When will LinkedIn integrate with the new Palm Synergy address book platform?” Rest assured, this is something that we’ve already begun development on. Stay tuned.
Over 100,000 LinkedIn users have shared over a million professional news articles with their groups and connections, since we started offering the news sharing feature. We’ve received a ton of great feedback on the feature, with some of our users mentioning how inconvenient it was to participate in a group conversation given the additional step of returning to the news discussion page to leave a comment.
We’re now incorporating some of these suggestions we gathered, starting with the ActionBar. Moving forward, any user who clicks through an article shared on a LinkedIn group will be able to share and comment directly from the news article. You can also discover related news content through the same toolbar, without having to switch back and forth between the news discussion page (on LinkedIn) and the news article.
All of the above three actions can be made directly through the ActionBar that you can find on the top of the article you’ve clicked through to. Check out the screenshot below.
LinkedIn’s ActionBar will allow group members to find and add value to the news that is most important to their respective groups. And, our goal with this iteration is to make it even simpler for users to participate in these conversations.
As always – we look forward to and appreciate your feedback. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog or send us a tweet to @linkedin.
In November 2008, we launched LinkedIn Events – a product that enabled users to add an event and/or RSVP to an existing event. LinkedIn would let their network know they were attending by sending out a network update and displaying the event as a badge on their profile. Moving forward, we have made it even easier to find what events your professional contacts are attending or speaking at.
We have put together an experience that many users have been asking for: a way to see what events your connections are attending. Also on the new LinkedIn Events home page is a list of the most popular events in your industry, the events that you have RSVP’d to, all event related network updates, and the ability to search all of our events, add an event, or express interest in enhanced event listings.
To view the new home page you can either click on Events from the left hand navigation found under the Applications menu, from the events module on the home page, or by directly going to the LinkedIn Events hub.
As always, the team (Christian Niles – software engineer, Barbara Raitz – software engineer, Jeremy Gillick – web developer, Frank Ramirez – design) would love to get your feedback on the new feature. Please respond to this post via comments with your thoughts!
Some of you may have noticed the change to how and when your inbox shows up on your homepage: it will only appear when you have unread messages – but your inbox and your read messages are always available from the left navigation bar on the homepage. So, when your Inbox is empty and doesn’t display on your LinkedIn homepage, click through to your Inbox to check out your read messages.
Clicking through to the main page of your Inbox also reveals a new tabbed structure: all messages are easily accessible from the Received, Sent and Archived tabs. At a glance you can now see all your messages and easily drill down by applying a filter, for example invitations.
Check out the new look of your Inbox and leave us your feedback at the bottom of the post.
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Editor’s note: This blog post is authored by 
