LinkedIn is the only social media platform I feel at home on. It's also the social media platform that takes the biggest toll on my mental health. It wasn't a surprise when I found out that my fellow students on LinkedIn feel similarly. Students are the next generation of LinkedIn users, but the negative effects of the platform have young professionals fleeing for more student-friendly tools like Handshake and even creating their own (*cough* Nova *cough*). Me and and my product-savvy friends decided to dive deeper into why students are turning away from the platform — and explore how we can bring them back.

As the sole product designer on the team, I led the project through the design process, conducted research, created all design artifacts, and iterated (and iterated and iterated) based on findings.

Upon advertising our idea, our team was invited to discuss next steps for LinkedIn for Students with LinkedIn's Chief Product Officer, Tomer Cohen.

The LinkedIn student experience is currently confusing, overwhelming, stressful, and lacks reflective components. For students, the cost is super disproportionate to the gains.

Equip the top professional platform with job search tools and mentorship capabilities and enable students to build a supportive community.

Before diving full-force into this project, we wanted to verify that our problem was actually a problem. We sent out a survey to students from our personal networks and various online communities to find patterns of wants, needs, and behavior.

Our survey yielded powerful insights into how students across different schools, majors, and demographics interact with LinkedIn.

Shobha and Khushi interviewed 10 college students to collect qualitative information about the student experience. We wanted to determine what college students value about LinkedIn and to gauge what needs LinkedIn can better meet.

Some of our questions included: Describe LinkedIn in 3 words. If LinkedIn disappeared how disappointed would you be on a scale of 1-5? Why do you use LinkedIn? Does LinkedIn successfully help you achieve that? What do you want to see on your feed when using LinkedIn? 

We created an affinity map in Miro to categorize findings from our interview sessions and initial survey. We coded the notes into three colors based on the top features we found in our preliminary research: Mentorship, Feed, Jobs. We grouped the pain points into common themes that emerged, such as LinkedIn's unintentional effects on student mental health.

We coordinated with LinkedIn employees throughout the design process to align with LinkedIn's ongoing business and product goals. These interviews helped my team and I learn more about LinkedIn's current and past projects and determine our scope of opportunity. We investigated what LinkedIn was currently doing to support its student user base by interviewing LinkedIn product managers. I also had a chance to evaluate how my design could leverage existing mental models and work with LinkedIn's core machine learning models.

In addition to our interviews with LinkedIn employees, we also collaborated with professionals and mentorship subject matter experts to learn more about LinkedIn's role in facilitating student mentorship and dive deeper into what an ideal mentorship experience consists of.

To wrap up the research phase, my team and I conducted additional user interviews to establish key pain points and better understand why students use LinkedIn.

I also began evaluating similar solutions to gain insight into what works and what doesn't for the student market. According to our user interviews and secondary research, some popular alternatives to LinkedIn include Nova (f.k.a. Ladder), Handshake, and professional communities on Slack and Discord. I also looked into popular supplementary tools like Calendly and adplist.org to determine what value those experiences offered to students. Lastly, I looked at LinkedIn's other products, such as their recruiting tools, to see how they have approached similar problems. From evaluating these experiences, I found that LinkedIn excelled in a few key areas and missing some desired features.

Create a mentor-mentee feature that mimics the structure of how recruiters on LinkedIn connect with candidates.

Improve the student content experience so that young professionals feel more engaged and eager to participate on LinkedIn.

Improve the job search experience for young professionals by including more relevant information on company profiles and making search results more applicable to professionals with little to no experience.

Create an affordable membership tier that packages student-oriented featutures.

In the first iteration, I fit mentorship into the LinkedIn environment and decided to focus on the mobile experience since LinkedIn is a mobile-first application. The entry point would be the LinkedIn feed. I decided to make mentors a search filter in LinkedIn, similar to People and Companies, so that users could smoothly adapt to the change. I also explored two different flows that users could take to book a session with LinkedIn mentors.

After running this first iteration by our user testing participants, we discovered that Option A was the preferred method of booking a mentorship session. With that knowledge, I created a medium-fidelity desktop prototype to ensure that the flow I created translated across multiple interfaces.

In the first iteration, I integrated new job-related features that my team I and I brainstormed into the LinkedIn product. My team and I also decided that LinkedIn needed a new "homepage" where users could manage job-related information without getting overwhelmed. We used the existing "Jobs" tab on LinkedIn as an entry point into this new homepage.

After running this first iteration by our user testing participants, we found that one of our proposed features, Job Tracker, was not solving a high-priority problem for students. Students had personal methods of tracking job applications and didn't find value in migrating to one on LinkedIn. What students needed most from LinkedIn are jobs opportunities relevant to their skills and experience level, and a central location where they can manage their job search. Students also care greatly about company culture and values, and would like to be able to keep better track of that while job hunting.

In the first iteration of the revamped LinkedIn feed, my team and tested out the concept of a "student hub" -  a separate feed with student-centric content. This idea was inspired by the feed that LinkedIn users could find in a LinkedIn group. We decided to create on onboarding experience as well so we could collect data that would help us personalize each student's unique feed. We also decided to create "post templates" so that posts could be easily tagged and promoted based on their content.

After running this first iteration by our user testing participants, we found that students liked the idea of a student-centric feed but didn't want to spend time onboarding onto it. Students also preferred to filter their main feed instead of switching between multiple. Lastly, we found that students liked the the new post templates, but didn't want to be boxed in by options. We also ran our new feed by LinkedIn product managers who gave us insight into the feasibility of a student-centric feed and found that the time and effort it would take to create a second feed outweighed any potential benefits. From this feedback, I decided to explore ways in which we could enhance the existing feed.

The final Feed fature includes a "Students Only" filter when posting to encourage informal conversation and community building amongst students. Students can also improve their feed by following student-related hashtags.

In addition to presenting our polished proposal to multiple stakeholders at LinkedIn, my team and I spread our idea across the LinkedIn platform. Our idea grabbed the attention of students and as well as LinkedIn's product team. We were asked to meet with LinkedIn's Chief Product Officer, Tomer Cohen, to discuss next steps.