LinkedIn Design Challenge 2018 — University Community 🎓
The central hub for university groups and events.
By Antonio Song, Carnegie Mellon University ’20
Information Systems + Human-Computer Interaction.
Design tools used: Sketch, Principle
Project Duration: 1 week
Introducing: University Community 💁
The central hub for university groups and events.
Design Challenge Brief 💼
Introduction
LinkedIn is a place where people can connect to people they know, in order to share professional experience and opportunities. Professional networking can begin at any point, even in school. Increasingly, students are relying on their mobile address book, and not their email address book, to manage their contacts.Task
Design an experience that helps college students discover and connect to their classmates, without relying on email.Scope
Please think through the end to end experience, and share your thought process, approach, insights, and analysis with us. However, we want to limit the scope of the final deliverable to one high-fidelity design comp that demonstrates your interaction and visual design capabilities.
Initial Thoughts 🧠
Reading the task immediately got me thinking:
“Who uses email to reach out to classmates these days? Don’t everyone use Facebook?”
Turns out I was overlooking a crucial part of college life — projects and extracurriculars — but more on this later. It also brought up a few questions to mind:
Fundamental Questions
- Why do they want to discover / connect to their classmates? What benefits are there? What opportunity spaces are present?
- How do students currently discover and connect to their classmates?
- Under what circumstances do students use LinkedIn vs. Facebook / Email to connect with classmates?
In-depth Interviews 🎙
I conducted interviews with four current university students to get a deeper understanding of how students create connections with others.
Interview Synthesis ⏳
Based on the affinity diagram, it turns out that while LinkedIn is indeed the preferred way to reach out to professionals outside of their community circle (i.e. college alumni and complete strangers), it fell short when it came to connecting people within the same community (i.e. college-peers).
Opportunity Space 🎢:
I decided to target the area of the “Connection Scale” where LinkedIn is missing, which is currently dominated by .edu emails — the experience of reaching out to new acquaintances within, mainly for the purpose of discovering and/or recruiting for projects / groups.
Ideation 💡
Based on the opportunity space identified, I quickly drafted several key design goals and use cases.
Design goals
- Break the stereotype that LinkedIn is only for “professional” connections.
- Encourage the discovery & recruiting for projects and groups.
- If possible, encourage communication within projects / groups, expanding into Slack’s area as well.
Use cases
- Discover projects / groups within the university
- Identify members that are part of the projects / groups
- Express interest in these projects / groups
- Identify who holds leadership roles in projects / groups
- View events held by projects / groups
- Recruit members for projects (Leadership-side)
- Communicate with teammates within the group (future-consideration)
Entry Point
I noticed that other than the five menu buttons at the bottom, there is a hamburger menu that I haven’t interacted with at all.
It opens a “Your communities” menu, which includes hashtags that I follow, and groups that I’m part of. However, these barely feel like “communities” — especially when all the hash-tagged posts are broad generic blog posts on the topic, and some of the group pages are completely empty.
“Your communities” menu is definitely a feature that’s under-utilized, and it could tie in very well with the University Community feature that I’m trying to promote.
User Flow
A user flow was carefully constructed before any wireframing in order to get a holistic view of what the feature would look like, and to gauge the screen design requirements.
Wireframing and Prototyping 📐
Wireframes were creating using Sketch and prototypes were created using Principle.
Interactive Prototype 🤖
Made in Principle
I made sure that my feature implementation was non-disruptive. Coming up with new features is always fun, but users hate sudden changes. Therefore, I tried to preserve the original LinkedIn UX as much as possible while offering the best experience for the new features.
I also focused on creating fluid animations. Subtle and well-designed motions provide useful context to the users.
1. Utilization Of An Under-Used Space.
2. Filtered Groups And Organizations.
3. Insightful Groups Page.
4. Easily Join Groups And Organizations.
Future Considerations 🕰
Had I had more time, I would totally spend time imagining how to enable the communication between team members within the LinkedIn app. LinkedIn can be the central hub for all aspects of team management — recruiting, event invites, sub-channel messages within the team, etc — essentially eating into what Slack is doing today.
I would also dive deeper into how events would be managed in this system. Students should be able to discover interesting events hosted by these groups. Event managers should be able to create event postings and advertise to university students.
Feel free to gaze at my detailed hi-fi wireframes.
Made in Sketch.💎
Thank you for reading! 🙏
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out at antoniosong@cmu.edu.
antoniosong.com
