My Updated LinkedIn Feature Requests
The month of February 2008 was a very busy one at LinkedIn, it seems. A number of improvements and modifications were made to the site, including network upgrades which now show Group Membership changes, a much maligned News function, and a major graphical overhaul of the User Interface.
So far, I'm liking the new interface, which takes a little bit of getting used to if you are a very regular LI user. The performance of the site, however, needs a little work, as it has gotten noticeably slower since the upgrades. I expect LinkedIn to take a week or two to get the kinks out, either by tweaking the code and other visual elements, or by throwing some hardware at the problem. The solution will likely involve some combination of both approaches.
Now that the major graphical modifications have occurred, I hope that LinkedIn will quickly move to make more substantial functionality changes that will greatly improve the LinkedIn professional networking experience. There are lots of features that LinkedIn could look to implement, but I seriously hope that they will give preference towards those which facilitate business networking, and not those which are simply social networking staples. We have enough purely social networks already, and there's a reason that I don't spend a great deal of time on them today.
Back in September, I made an initial list of things I wanted to see LinkedIn provide, and I think it's time to revisit and enhance that list. There are several areas where I see that the LinkedIn experience could be significantly improved, strengthening its hold on the business crowd:
| Clarification about the function of LinkedIn Answers |
It seems pretty evident, from many of the questions found on LinkedIn Answers, that many new users see LinkedIn Answers as the vehicle for reach Customer Service and Support at LinkedIn. Not only that, but many of the questions new users ask, and many of situations they face are a direct result of poor design decisions on the part of LinkedIn.
If the Customer Service link (and the Help & FAQ link) was made as prominent as the Answers link is, people would tend to get the information they needed on Using LinkedIn at this basic level in the most efficient way. Furthermore, if there was clearer and more insistent guidance for new users to add all of their email addresses to their profile, then a major part of the underlying problem (inadvertent multiple profiles) would go away. Of course, LinkedIn wouldn't be able to claim 19 million accounts, because it would be more like 14 million account, 10 million of which were moderately active. I can imagine why they wouldn't want that to happen, but we would all benefit if there were 10 million active users who were able to make efficient use of LinkedIn, than 19 million users, only a small subset of which can reap the intended benefits of the system. |
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| Feature Requests |
| There is no category under LinkedIn Customer Service to register a feature request. Given how many questions I see on LinkedIn related to new or desired features, this would be a good category to add. I've already asked LinkedIn for such each time I have conversed with them. |
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| Contact Management Features |
I would like to be able to track how and when someone joined my network. And I want to be able to indicate how I met them. It would be nice to be able to tag each contact or potential contact and keep notes on them. For instance, what about someone you see in LinkedIn Answers who you think, "this might be someone great to connect with." It would be helpful to be able to make a note against their profile, without having to resort to an external application. This is especially true of those whose network is larger.
And, speaking of Contact Management, there should be a way for someone to easily put together a list of contacts that he or she would like to manage as a group, similar to the Address Book functionality of an email client. This would allow one to reach out periodically to a group of contacts, pending their own preferences for being contacted, and inform or request something of them without having to go through the tedious process of selecting the names one at at time from the list of contacts. (It wouldn't hurt if you could perform quick keystroke lookups in the existing contact lists, btw.) |
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| Tiered Contacts |
I know I previously wrote about Tiered Contacts in my September posting, but I have to say it again. In the "real world" we have various tiers of friends, colleagues and associates, each with a different level of access and commitment from us, and there's no reason why we shouldn't have the same shouldn't be available via LinkedIn.
It's this whole flat network thing that spawns the bulk of the ideological battles between Open Networkers and those who only connect to their closest friends, people they have worked with directly, and anyone they could make a legitimate recommendation for.
Both professional networking ideologies are valid, and both could be supported equally, if LinkedIn would allow us to make a limited set of categories (say, 10) by which we could categorize our contacts, and then allow us to apply permissions to those contacts in terms of what they could access from our profiles, and what type of updates they would receive from us.
Instead of just choosing between Everyone, Contacts Only, and No-one, we would also have the option for setting what each of our custom groups could see and do. The number of available groups could be dependent on ones membership level. |
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| Bring Back the Personal Plus membership |
I am a Personal Plus member, at US$60/year. This gives me a little more functionality than the free account, but is much more palatable than any of the business accounts, as I am not in professional sales or recruiting.
It seems, however, that LinkedIn has removed this option for new members. You can only upgrade to the exorbitant Business accounts ranging from $20/month to $200/month. No thanks. My subscription was renewed successfully last month, but I think there would be many people who would be willing to pay $5-10/month to get more functionality and priority customer service. Let's not forget all of these folks -- the Personal Plus membership addresses this constituency. |
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| Facilitating Introductions |
Okay, someone please tell me why LinkedIn Introductions are "get-centric" rather than "give-centric"? In other words, why is it that in order for me to be introduced to someone, I need to make the request myself, but I cannot facilitate the introduction of party A to party B, with whom I am already connected? You would think that this is a basic aspect of professional networking.
There should be a way for me to setup an introduction for one of my contacts, Bob, and introduce him to one or more of my other contacts, Dave, Sue, Fred, and Lisa -- in one shot. No personal information would be provided to any of the parties, and the intended recipients would be free to accept or reject the introduction as they wished. Over time, I could see which of my connections were responsible for putting me in touch with lots of new people, and which were receptive to new introductions that I presented to them, which would give me valuable insight into who my treasured contacts were. Couple this with the Tiered Contacts functionality, and you have good reason to move contacts into more or less privileged status based on their interactions and the value they provide to your networking goals. |
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| Better UI Navigation |
| This is an area I covered previously, but hasn't yet been addressed by the recent design changes. LinkedIn needs to look at how people actually use the site, and make it easier for them to use it efficiently. It is currently way too tedious to perform a number of common activities in the current interface, and I have no doubt that many are discouraged from doing more with LinkedIn on a regular basis because of these issues. For instance, the following items take too many clicks to manage: - Moving through the Answers area, or changing from Answers in a limited category to All Answers
- Going through your list of sent invitations and resending the ones that haven't been responded to as yet
- Responding to several messages, encompassing InMails, Introductions and Q&A responses
- Checking for new users across all of your employers
These are some of the areas where an active networker spends much of his or her time during a session, and this is so inefficient as to result in a huge waste of time over the space of a week. |
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| Bookmarking or Favorites |
I would love to be able to bookmark a question that I don't currently have the time to answer, but would like to get back to at some point, without having to send mail to myself.
This also applies to questions that I don't intend to answer, but which contains answers that are relevant and useful to me (or for which I anticipate will eventually contain relevant answers).
I just need a way to quickly tag or identify such questions, and be able to get back to them quickly, without jumping through the current hoops. This same type of functionality could be used to keep track of interesting people, so that I could connect to them at some point, as mentioned in my Contact Management feature request. |
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| More Control of the Homepage Layout |
Among the recent changes to the LinkedIn home page, was the introduction of the News functionality. This feature, currently in beta, is supposed to provide you relevant news about your employer(s) or industry. This is probably the most hated feature on LinkedIn, but in terms of its content and its physical placement on the website, to say nothing of the lack of control about displaying it at all.
Different people work in different ways, and there are some multimillion LinkedIn members who have different styles and are using LinkedIn for different purposes. Some control has been given to us with the new design, but not nearly enough. We would welcome the opportunity to decide what elements were displayed on the homepage, and in what order. Sure, there might need to be one or two elements that MUST be there, but even those should afford us the ability to choose their placement. This would allow us to be efficient, and get to the data that we care about most quickly.
If we can't remove the elements outright, at least let us minimize or roll them up to a border, so as to be able to focus on what is critical to us. |
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| More LinkedIn Groups Functionality |
Why can't we search for Groups like we can for Answers, People or Jobs? Why can't we globally manage how our Group visibility like we can globally manage our Recommendations visibility?
LinkedIn has made the Group membership far more popular by including it in the Network Updates, but this has exposed the dearth of functionality for using and accessing Groups. |
The functionality being requested here is not ground breaking in any way, IMO. These are features that are already implemented with success across a variety of websites and in common applications, and their implementation would greatly impact the professional networking appeal of LinkedIn. There are lots of other things that LinkedIn is probably considering to implement, but I would prefer the ones above to functions that are of the basic social networking variety.
(For instance, I don't actually mind the "Status" feature that was recently introduced on LinkedIn, and it probably wasn't that hard to implement, but that's not the kind of feature that will extend LinkedIn's dominance in the professional networking arena. Instead, it might lead to what some have dubbed as "the MySpacification of LinkedIn.")
I am eager to get your thoughts about my feature request list -- which I will be sending to the good folks at LinkedIn -- and also hear about what features you would like to see LinkedIn deliver in the near future...
About Logik!
Andrew S. Baker aka ASB aka Logik!
Andrew S. Baker is a business-savvy, hands-on IT leader with expertise in mentoring people, mitigating risk, and integrating technology to drive innovation and maximize business results. He creates competitive advantage for organizations through effective IT leadership: implementation of processes and controls, and architecture of robust business solutions.
Mr. Baker has successfully led a number of high-performance technology teams in designing, deploying and maintaining secure, cost-effective computing environments for well-known companies, including Warner Music Group, The Princeton Review, Bear Stearns, About.com, and Lewco Securities.
For over a decade, Andrew has exhibited thought leadership on technology and business topics via mailing lists, technical forums, blogs, and professional networking groups, along with contributions to podcasts, webinars, and over 20 technical/business magazine articles. He also serves on several boards and committees for non-profit organizations, and within the Seventh-day Adventist church.
His personal interests include Astronomy, Basketball, Bible Study, Chess, Comics, Computers,
Family Life Ministries, Reading, Strategy/Role Playing games, and Professional Networking...
A summary of Andrew's current résumé is available here, and he can be reached on a variety of social and professional networks, including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.