LinkedIn ⋅ Placements Platform

This project focused on designing and platformizing LinkedIn to member in-app communications with a placement strategy and self-serve tool that allowed internal teams to create and manage new placements.

Project goals

Develop a delivery strategy

Create a strategy for delivering LinkedIn to member messaging that is based on a set of rules that reduce promotion overload and fatigue.

Have promos be less interrupting

Design a new suite of promos that are less interrupting and don’t inhibit a member from performing their intended tasks.

Enable teams to onboard promos

Establish a self-service solution for LinkedIn teams to onboard promos, removing the need for engineers to create and maintain new promos.

My role

Acting as the design lead, I partnered with the my product and engineering counterparts to guide this project from initial strategy to detailed design and engineering handoff. This was an ambitious project that required buy-in from senior leadership in order to receive enough funding to spin up a new engineering team. I worked closely with my cross-functional leads to uncover our core problems and opportunities through a combination of design and journey mapping workshops. I then partnered with my product counterpart to develop a series of presentations that we used to road show with other Flagship teams and senior leadership. Finally, I presented our work at Flagship all hands and Design Show & Tells as we continued to evangelize our work and build both visibility and partnerships to see through our vision. We’ll review two key projects.

Placement strategy

Formed the design strategy and principles for the member-facing placements.

Self-serve tool

Created the MVP design strategy and detailed designs for the internal self-serve tool.

Placement strategy

Placements refer to a unique location in the LinkedIn product where a promotion can render. Defining where a promotion could render, and what should be rendered, were core questions that I worked with my cross-functional partners to define and design.

LinkedIn’s internal teams historically utilized promotions to highlight products and features to members. These communications were ubiquitous but fraught with problems for internal teams and members viewing them.

Problems

Creation tools

The existing promotion system lacked proper creation tools, reporting tools, and optimization mechanisms needed to deliver quality communications.

Promo bombardment

Members were subject to an oversaturation of promos and often required to wade through multiple promos before completing a task.

Engineering effort

New promotions required engineering effort (avg. 2 weeks). There was no consistent portfolio of reusable templates and no self-serve tooling to expedite creation.

Historical promo examples

App store 1 star rating: Each time I open the app just to check the notifications, I'm forced to go through a lengthy process of skipping everything the app begs me to set up. No. You simply cannot start using the app without skipping and swiping.

Voices of members

App store 1 star rating: I just want to go to my profile!!! This app spams you with question after question EVERY time you open it. You have to keep skipping and swiping through multiple pages to finally get to your profile. Enough with the spamming! I purposely avoid opening the app so I don't have to deal with all the same questions over and over.

The challenge

How might we evolve a vast number of disorganized, visually dissimilar, and poorly delivered promos...

Into a single unified system with templates that are selected and delivered to members with relevance and cool-off rules?

Journey mapping

To further understand our member’s problems, I facilitated a journey mapping workshop with the core team to visualize a common user journey and illustrate just how distracting current promotions were to a member trying to accomplish a task.

Opportunities

By examining existing interactions with promos, the team was able to more fully understand the problems and rally around a common set of opportunities.

Promo bombardment

Aim to increase promotion spacing to ensure users encounter fewer promos to limit blindness.

Render contexually

Reinforce the meaning and benefit of promo based on the last task accomplished or adjacent content.

Remove interruptions

Only serve promos once the user has had the chance to complete their incoming task, stop interrupting.

Establish a system

Promos should relate to one another and follow a similar theme both in interaction and visual design.

Design principles

Connected

The placement makes sense to the member based on who they are, where they are, and what they’re doing.

Contextual

The placement feels native to the experience and contextual, not bolted on or disruptive to the member’s task.

Consistent

Placements follow consistent design patterns and feel like they’re part of a family of LinkedIn to member comms.

Our first placements

Why Feed cards?

The current promo was one of the most egregiously outdated. Feed was also the top requested placement by partner teams because of high traffic.

Why tooltips?

This promo had become one of the most utilized patterns with a wide variety of user experiences and visual styling, with no strategy around what type of tooltip to use depending on the team’s goals.

Self-serve tool

An internal tool that allows LinkedIn teams to choose a placement from a portfolio, select delivery criteria and launch a new placement with no engineering effort, removing about 2 weeks of engineering time.

Create and launch their own promos with no engineering support.

Have a view of all available promotions and all live promotions.

The challenge

How might we create a self-service tool that allows internal teams to:

Be able to judge a promo’s impact with enhanced reporting and tool compatibility.

Discovery

I kicked this project off by facilitating a design sprint with the cross functional team focused on building a common understanding of the problem and uncovering potential opportunities.

Self-serve user journey

Sprint workshop

Solutions

A sampling of screens from the self-service tool flow showing a product manager or product marketing manager requesting budget and then creating an placement experiment with multiple variants.

Null state