LinkedIn, Get The Small Things Right

Congrats, LinkedIn. Your user base now tops 500 million. You have two powerhouse CEOs now - Jeff Weiner and Satya Nadella (though since Satya paid so much for you, perhaps you can find someone to help him fill out the rest of his LinkedIn profile). You contributed nearly $1 billion to Microsoft's bottom line last quarter. You're getting a lot of the big things right.

But for the sake of your users - even the folks (like me) who will put up with A LOT from your ever-changing site and apps and pricing plans - can you focus on the little things? You'd think that with these odd user experience, design, and feature hiccups, someone there could file a ticket and get those fixed pretty quickly.

Here's a list. And fellow LinkedIn members, please share your own thoughts in the comments. What else is missing? Let's create a great list together and make sure the LinkedIn team sees it:

  1. Allow members to mark messages as unread from the mobile app (you can in the desktop view). This one's personal; I neglected to respond to a very important message once because I glanced and it, and then it got buried under others. Marking messages as unread can fix that.
  2. Allow message archiving, so you can get messages out of the way without deleting them. This could also solve some of the 'mark as unread' issue. If you strive to get to Inbox Zero, then you can only have the most important messages in front of you.
  3. Allow members to view 1st-degree contacts' email addresses and other contact details in the mobile app (you can in desktop).
  4. In the desktop view, when you add a connection, it shows you're connected, but you can't click the name. Make that name clickable so you can go directly back into that contact. Right now, when adding the connection, you then need to search for them to get into their profile. And you typically need to refresh the profile, because it says the connection is "pending" right after you add them; it doesn't once refreshed. Lastly, the UX is different (and worse) if you had a connection from the My Network view versus the Invitation Manager view. Fittingly for LinkedIn, the default My Network view is the one with the worse experience.
  5. Bring back email alerts to show SlideShare updates from people you follow. I really miss this one, as I found such great content via SlideShare that way, and it always helped my own distribution for SlideShare presentations.
  6. Make it easy to find people you know (such as your LinkedIn connections) on SlideShare and follow them. It has never been easy to do this there, even pre-LinkedIn, and it's a missed opportunity.
  7. Add Facebook-style granularity in terms of unfollowing certain people specifically - like news about certain people. For instance, there's a certain marketing guru that a lot of my friends follow, and they 'like' all his quotes. I don't need to see this stuff all the time, It should be very easy for me to hide any posts about this guy, but I can only unfollow the people I'm connected to, which I don't want to do.
  8. On the desktop view, when adding a connection, a pop-up appears recommending you customize the invitation, saying, "LinkedIn members are more likely to accept invitations that include a personal note." I love this moment of pause here, but it's only on desktop, and there's not even an option to include a note via mobile.
  9. When publishing an article on LinkedIn, make it possible to tag LinkedIn connections in the post. You can only do this afterward in the comments right now, but it would be much better to have this in the body of the post when mentioning peers on LinkedIn.

So yes, LinkedIn, please make the experience more consistent. And better. And when you come across something buggy or weird, please fix it. 500 million of us would appreciate it.

Disclosure: None.

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