LinkedIn ⋅ Services Marketplace
This project focused on bringing the Services Marketplace, a new product offering to market with the goal of becoming the definitive platform for providing and purchasing services.
Project goals
Capture buyer sentiment
Harness digital word of mouth by enabling service relationships that capture buyer sentiment, allowing other members to purchase via “digital word of mouth.”
Establish seller storefronts
Establish seller storefronts that showcase services and support full customer lifecycles.
Leverage the network
Take advantage of LinkedIn’s network to help buyers qualify sellers, and help sellers identify the best leads while streamlining their workflow and tools.
My role
Acting as the Services design lead, I contributed designs on several key projects, while also planning and guiding the design work for the two other track designers. I was the design strategy lead and worked with 3 product and 2 engineering leads to guide roadmap decisions, resource projects and deliver on an aggressive 0-1 product with a tight go to market deadline.
I also took the lead in evangelizing our work with my cross-functional partners. We regularly needed to get adjacent teams on-board with our product plans and I helped craft our road show narratives as well as present at several all hands. We’ll review two of the foundational projects I led.
Service pages
Designed the surface allowing providers to list services and buyers to find them.
Ratings & reviews
Led the design strategy for buyers rating and reviewing service providers.
Service pages
Service Pages are the backbone of the Services Marketplace acting as the central system surface allowing service providers to list services and buyers to find and interact with them.
Problems
Before this project, a service provider could choose to showcase services they offered as a detail page of profile via a framework called ‘Open to.’
We knew from UER that most freelancers used their profile as the primary means of doing business on LinkedIn, but there were numerous challenges with the existing service provider’s detail views.
Search
Profile with Open to card
Business details
Page type constraints
Open to details rendered as fixed height page, heavy in plain text and with no personalization.
Discoverability issues
Architected as leaf pages without unique URLs, the provider details were not searchable or shareable.
No future extensibility
Open to details rendered as fixed height page, heavy in plain text and with no personalization.
The challenge
How might we create an extensible Service storefront experience that allows service providers and buyers to:
Have a single place in the ecosystem where all information about a Service provider can be accessed.
Be flexible enough to support providers who operate as either individuals (via Profile) or companies (via Company Pages).
Provide for robust future viewing and management of: Ratings and Reviews, Appointment scheduling, Pricing, Client management, RFP management, Payments, etc...
Ideation
MVP Solutions
This foundational release established the architectural and navigational patterns needed for future feature development and allowed the team to begin marketing the new Services surface to LinkedIn Members.
Buyer view
Seller view
If bound to Company Page
Ratings & reviews
From UER and competitive analysis we knew that ratings and reviews were vitally important to marketplace dynamics, allowing service providers to build credibility and buyers to make more informed hiring decisions.
Discovery
In addition to reviewing the competitive landscape, I performed an audit to see where there might be opportunities to align vs. the need to diverge from existing ratings experiences on LinkedIn.
UER Insights
Buyers
Ratings were considered a “general indicator” of quality, and there was additional social credibility afforded by LinkedIn ratings.
Sellers
Reviews were thought to help build trust with clients by showcasing past successes and help differentiate their services from competitors.
Rating system explorations
Early strategy focused on a five-point rating system based on a recommendation scale that presented some challenges. We also had the challenge of aligning with adjacent experiences.
Interaction design
In early wireframes, we explored a five-star rating system with a ‘Service compliments’ section. UER insights indicated that chasing five stars could cheapen the experience and prove less valuable to buyers seeking more authentic reviews.
Considering the UER insight that social credibility was one of our biggest strengths, we hypothesized that reviews should be personal, like a recommendation from one buyer to another as we see with word of mouth referrals.
Keeping the recommendation binary simplified the experience and put even great emphasis on a quality written review.
Solutions
We landed on an aggregate five-star rating system comprised of four service characteristics that we hypothesized would make it easier for buyers to hire confidently.
Review
Consume
Review flow
Outcomes
Service pages
More than 5.4M members have created Service Pages on LinkedIn.
Ratings & reviews
Over 60K reviews of service providers have been recorded.
Continued growth
Monthly views of Service Pages has grown by 120% since launch.