LinkedIn: Meetings Feature
Overview
This project is a case study / freelance position with LinkedIn where I designed a new feature to improve the networking landscape in a post COVID environment by making meetings easier to schedule.
Link to the interactive Mobile Prototype.
Highlights
- Worked as a Lead Designer in a team of (2) Product Designers
- Identified a need on a large platform
- Validated assumption by creating a post that gained 49,000+ views, 300+ likes, & 50+ comments
- Sourced users on LinkedIn and conducted usability tests
- Connected with the CEO & Sr. Product Designer to deliver findings
Step 1: Identifying a Need
LinkedIn: Meetings Feature
Overview
This is one of my favorite side projects because of its story. The whole process from the problem, ideation, testing, and validation occurred on the platform. Our team worked on this during COVID, where a majority of networking was occurring online. I was connecting with one of my friends and saw that he preferred to send audio messages, rather than typing them out. He would often leave LinkedIn for a more chat friendly product such as whatsapp. We wanted to test this idea to see how other users viewed this concept.
Identifying a pain point
My friend and I were chatting on LinkedIn. He found it was easier to record an audio message rather than typing since he was on the move. Eventually, this became too cumbersome, and left LinkedIn in favor of whatsapp.
Then we thought, "Wouldn't it be great if we could just schedule a meeting on LinkedIn?". We believed it would be extremely helpful to us, and may be helpful to others networking in COVID-19 landscape
Concept Validation
We took to LinkedIn and made a post to gauge interest. We wanted to see what the community had to say, and whether this concept would be worth pursuing.
Results
Validated assumption by creating a post that gained 49,000+ views, 300+ likes, & 50+ comments
Connected with LinkedIn CEO & Sr. Product Designer
Approximately 50% (30/63 commenters) expressed interest in this feature
Ideation & Development
Design and Ideation
Overview
This was more than enough validation to move forward. We wanted to grow as designers and contribute to a product that is almost essential in this day and age.
Our next step was to consolidate the data from our post, & DMs to find the best way to move forward. he idea was to get a simple prototype together, and reach out to our networks to validate whether or not this was a feature LinkedIn users would be interested in. We referenced existing design patterns on similar platforms to inform our design decisions
Highlights
- Approximately, 50% of our 50+ responses expressed interest in the feature
- After connecting with LinkedIn's Sr. Product Designer, we identified the basic flow of Scheduling Meetings and following up with a video chat
- We designed a simple calendar implementation based on Google Hangouts
- We based the contacting option based on Facebook's messenger feature
Usability Tests
User Sourcing and Testing
Overview
Our next step was to test our concept, and gather actionable data to pass on to our client. We contacted users who responded to our post and asked them if they would be interested in running usability tests to contribute to the new feature. We received over 20 responses and set up 5 for the first round
Synthesis
Usability Test Findings
User Feedback
- Social Implications: linkedIn is not the same as Facebook. Users may not know each other well enough to receive unsolicited phone calls
- Real Estate: it may be easier to have the scheduling section in the header, rather than the chat box
- Upcoming Meetings: where do users view their meetings (scheduled, archived, upcoming, etc)
Hypotheses For Next Iteration
- LinkedIn's Design System: Designing the prototype according to LinkedIn's system will decrease the user cognitive load, and will be a more applicable handoff to our client
- Edge Cases: Adjust the user flow, and prototype to reflect our usability test findings
- Personas: continue to develop personas to identify their needs
- Form Design: users stated that they would need more information to schedule a meeting. Our goal was to explore designs that weren't constrained by the chat box
Business Thinking
Ideating within Constraints
Product Thoughts
During our next iteration, we had to be mindful that LinkedIn is a complex product with a lot of working parts. We wanted to deliver a solution that could be implemented within their existing system first and foremost. Then, we wanted to consider what the product could develop into once it received more validation.
Above, I showed our iterations for how the concept could be implemented in-chat. The most basic solution would be to add an option to schedule the meeting through a third party app, but our users stated it would be immensely useful to be able to do everything within LinkedIn. Based on this feedback, we designed a form feature that could be integrated with the chat feature.
Prototyping
Prototyping with HTML, CSS, and Javascript
Remote User Testing
Because we worked on this project during COVID, we had to conduct all of our usability tests over remotely through Zoom. On top of that, we had to coordinate meeting times with our users throughout the work day to gather our insights. We wanted to develop a prototype that reflected our idea of what the design should be. In turn, this made our usability tests more efficient. A link to the working protype is here Here
User Sourcing Part 2
We reached out to other users from our initial post and made another post with the new prototype. This attracted the attention of more users on LinkedIn and allowed us to schedule another round of usability tests.
Results
Sourced more users with a new pospt that reached 5,000+ views, 40+ likes, & 10+ comments
Led to conducting 10+ remote usability tests
Synthesis Pt. 2
Findings
- 71% (5/7 users): stated that scheduling was their main pain point and video chat was a "nice-to-have"
- 100% (9/9 users): expressed interested in the ability to sync the feature with their calendars (Google Calendar, Calendly, Outlook, etc)
- 86% (6/7 users): experienced a pain point around social interations when scheduling meetings (i.e. who should schedule the meeting, what if there's an ask, power dynamic, etc)
- Connection: do users have to be connected to send meeting invitations to one another?
Conclusion
Handing off our Work
We handed off our designs, and data to our LinkedIn connect. At the time, they didn't have enough bandwidth to accommodate such a large change, but we could see this feature implemented in the future.
A few weeks after we handed off our designs, I noticed that there was a third-party chat integration that connected to Zoom, Outlook, and Blue Jeans. Whether or not we had any factor in that is unclear, but it was very interesting to work on a project that faces a lot of customers.