I’ve been signed up to LinkedIn.com for a couple of weeks, and have built up a decent sized list of connections. I was pleasantly surprised by the mechanism, for making connections – namely, that there’s no way to “cold call” someone. You need to know their contact details in order to send them a connection request. Once you have made the connection, you are able to be introduced to that person’s contacts, with LinkedIn acting as a trusted intermediary. The whole thing is, in the fashion, self-moderated, and spammers and the like should be fairly easy to prohibit given the traceability of connections.
However, the site suffers from a problem particular to the new breed of ventures which celebrate the interconnectedness of all things. Where every element can be commented on, blogged, syndicated, added to a profile, sent to friends and so on. The problem is that unless the user experience is consistent in every single instance of interaction, the site can become incredibly disorienting.
In a typical example, a user might see a “invite friends” email address form on a page, which they arrived at after clicking on a link in an HTML email sent to them by that website. The next time they want to invite friends to use the service, they might hunt around fruitlessly for a page with the same layout and form in order to do so, until giving up in frustration. Remember, users won’t stick around long if we make them feel stupid. if we’re making them think, web designers are not doing their job properly.
The LinkedIn problem is that they don’t seem to have settled on a consisent design pattern for adding a connection. There are several ways to do this on the site, all appearing in different places on different pages. The calls to action are variously titled “Build your network”, “Add connections”, “Create invitations”, “Send invitation” and “Expand your network”. These links can appear in the form of a textual hyperlink, a button or a dropdown menu. They either go directly to a page containing a form, or to a page containing a summary of the types of connection you can invite and a link to a further web form to actually do so.
Now while I appreciate that sometimes it can be a good idea to immerse the user in options and let them choose their own path, in this case the designers have surely diluted the user journey to such an extent that there is no clear and consistent behaviour for the user to perform.
in my experience users search for features and layouts they recognise rather than logically drilling down through the site architect’s no doubt carefully planned navigation. it’s a sort of muscle memory, where a user will try to retrace a series of earlier steps in order to arrive at a remembered destination. We need to appeal to the user’s mechanical and automatic recognition of the task they wish to perform, and allow them to do this in the quickest and simplest way possible. I thin LinkedIn can afford to pare down their offering in favour of a more direct approach, without losing the free flow of the site.
i think i like the LinkedIn idea, and i’m sure it will prove useful. right now i just don’t really like the experience of using it very much.