#PretendProduct : LinkedIn Feature Suggestions
Pretend Product is a series of product improvements or inventions based on my everyday problems.
I spend most of my free time on LinkedIn so I have a lot of suggestions as an avid user:
Feed & Posting
Favorite an account to “see first” so that I never miss a post from my favorite content creators.
Pinned comments so that I don’t have to dig through a sea of comments to find the registration link.
Text-to-speech integration so that my smart home device can read my feed to me as I go about my day.
Messaging
Flag unread messages. I may open and forget to respond. If I don’t respond to a message, flag it. Then, I can filter by “Flagged” or some other marker to get back to all the people I need to respond to.
Notifications
A better delineation of notification types. I either get too many notifications or too few. I unsubscribed from likes only to find out it was likes of my comments on other people’s content as well as likes of my own content. Be more explicit about what “Stop receiving notifications like this” really means on your end in addition to better segmenting different types of notifications so I can opt into what I care about most without being driven away by a flood of noise. I’m not too concerned about the 67 people who liked my comment on a viral post but I do want to know about 6 people in my network engaging with my content.
Emails notify you of an event without linking to it so all I can do is know that I’ve been notified then delete the email. Link to the event page please.
Having the notification that someone has endorsed me for skills take me to the skills endorsed rather than having to click through my skills listed to deduce which ones the notification was referring to.
Having notifications of comments/replies go to the comment itself rather the post in general so that I won’t need to go find the comment from the person that was named in the notification.
Profile
Archive skills and their endorsements rather than deleting them.
Keep the profile picture in a single consistent place across views so that those of us who design LinkedIn banners know where to accurately keep negative space for the profile picture.
Pronouns and preferred name. People already attempt to solve for this by saying Phyllis (nickname) Njoroge (pronouns). I try to keep a mental note when people say they prefer to be called a shorter version of their name or the like but mental notes only go so far.
Edit a personalized connection request after it has been sent. Also, unsend a connection request that has yet to be accepted.
Technical issues
In a post’s menu, copying link to post goes to the post in feed that says “This person liked this post” rather than the post itself, making it hard to share with others.
Similarly, the unfollow option is for the person whose activity is being shown rather than the author of the post itself.
The profile preview doesn’t show up in the incoming connection request list or when hovering over a person’s image in your recommendations as it would when hovering elsewhere on the site.
If I message someone who also sent me a connection request, they show as two different conversations. If I send a connection request to someone who has sent me a connection request, one of our messages gets lost depending on who accepts the request first.
Once a connection request has been accepted, the page does not refresh. The accept option becomes disabled but the ignore does not. Along with this, if I try to message someone whose request I just accepted, it hasn’t registered that we’re already 1st connections. It will try to send as my message as InMail or if they have already messaged me, it will incorrectly state “You haven’t connected with” at the top of the message.
This is not a complete post. Just a placeholder, teaser, if you will for a fully built out thoughtful piece on LinkedIn’s room for improvement. Stay tuned.
