LinkedIn Redesign

While in the process of job hunting, Linkedin is a tool that empowers working professionals to take their careers into their own hands, and find the job of their dreams. With such a grand mission, I was inspired to give my take on how the UI could be tweaked to give a more modern look, focusing mostly on the the visual UI components and evolving the design system. 

Homepage 

The design approach I took was focused on minimalism, eliminating elements, that took up space or could be repositioned to give the user a smoother experience. A missed opportunity on the homepage is the activity module on the left hand side. I chose to combine it with the article-post component to free up more space for the feed and thereby making it a more useful component by decluttering the layout.

Navigation

The goal for the navigation was centered on making the search bar a bigger component of the layout. No other component is used more and bringing it into center and increasing the size demonstrates its importance on the platform. I chose to focus on home, profile, message, and networking as the key navigation items based on their usage, and pushed jobs, premium and notifications into the dropdown of the profile. Less navigation items made the spacing cleaner. 

Profile

The profile was spaced out a bit more and to keep things a bit more consistent I emulated the feed’s layout and designed the user’s content with that same mindset. One feature that I wanted to bring back was skills and endorsements, there is a lot of value in showing the community endorsing a users’ skillset and makes Linkedin feel more like a community. 

Messages

The changes to the messages sections were pretty light and focused on modernizing the UI a bit but keeping the same overall flow and functionality of Linkedin’s current message screen.

MyNetwork

I took the most creative freedom with the MyNetwork section, giving the user the opportunity to add banner’s to their social card giving them the opportunity to make a memorable first impression and stand out of the crowd. Linkedin’s platform is an opportunity to reach to not only people in your close circles but to their communities and being able to make a unique first expression is crucial in increasing one’s network.

Conclusion

This was a fun exercise in testing the limits of what can be done to effect the visual design of Linkedin’s web application while not diluting it’s overall purpose. Linkedin designer’s have to make design decisions that effect millions of users so that adds constraints to what can be done visually, this was simply an opportunity for me play with some of the components and try something different. 

Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Sketch