LinkedIn Lenses is a tool for organizing and tailoring your professional profile on Linkedin.
inspiration
It’s increasingly commonplace for professionals, especially creative ones, to have hyphenated identities. Many of my friends who use LinkedIn have at least a handful of “side hustles” and juggle multiple careers and projects. They use LinkedIn to promote their wide range of capabilities, and to find opportunities where they can utilize the diverse skills they’ve picked up and refined over the years. They are artists, writers, animators, and coders who exist in multiple fields, sometimes at the same time.
What is it?
LinkedIn Lenses is an update to LinkedIn’s profile page that moves beyond the static chronological résumé to allow users to create custom tabs and categories for their professional experience. It’s a self-directed project that was developed as an exercise in reinventing how we think about our professional histories, with the goal of creating a dynamic of looking at a user’s career history and providing new lenses through which to view a person's career progression and trajectory.
Linkedin's current design
Currently, LinkedIn only displays users’ professional experience and history chronologically. Users’ professional histories are shown most recent to least, with emphasis on what they doing now. As for skills, there is a dedicated section for skills called “Skills and Experience”, but those are shown in one large list towards the bottom of profiles and organized by the number of endorsers per skills from highest to lowest. While nice to have, many recruiters do not take these endorsements seriously, and this feature is often overlooked in favor of the more personalized Testimonials feature on LinkedIn.
guiding questions
- How can profiles on LinkedIn be a place where a user could develop a more complete narrative about their professional experience?
- What are dynamic alternatives to the classic resume’s chronological work history?
- What kind of tools could the user be equipped with to help them put equal emphasis on skills and experience beyond a sequential framework?
- And how can we restore value to the Skills & Endorsements feature?
USERS personas
In evolving this idea, I wanted to talk to people in my community about how they use LinkedIn. Several patterns and commonalities emerged, from which a series of targeted user personas were developed.
Process and Insights
I decided to focus on LinkenIn's mobile app, so I went through the steps of adding a new position in my job history, editing text, and adding and hiding skills and endorsements in order to see where my solution would fit into the existing user flow. Based on what I found, I created a new user journey that incorporated the capability for the user to add customizable tabs that they can name and order based on how they want to categorize their work experience.
Additionally, after doing some research about the success of LinkedIn's Skills and Endorsements feature, I found that they are an oft-overlooked feature that recruiters seldom take into consideration. My proposed solution provides a way for users to list their skills and for their network to recognize and validate them while having the option of selecting skills (along with their associated endorsers) to add onto their work history.
Mapping out the user journey through creating new Lenses and the subtle shift of incorporating the skills feature into their experience history.
Note: In creating the user flow and wireframes, I referenced an earlier mobile project I had completed - a simple iOS application that allows the user to organize and catalogue a list of names into customizable categories and values - in order to think through the process of adding and customizing the new features. That project can be viewed here.
SOLUTION
For the mobile displays, I created screens that show how the user can update their profiles to include customizable tabs that can then be used to categorize their work experience. They can organize their work experience into these tabs based on self-determined terms, which are shown from most-recent to least, and users can make these tabs as broad or as specific as they choose.
I've also included a proposal for an update to the Skills feature, where users now have the option to add on specific skills, along with their endorsers, to their positions over their professional experience. This provides a way to add more value to your endorsements by linking them to specific roles, instead of lumped together in one list that can be easily overlooked.
final screens
This sequence shows the proposed user profile with the new Lenses feature within the Experience section.
adding a new lens
These screens show the process of adding a new Lens to your professional experience. The user starts by selecting the blue circle symbol (1) in the bottom righthand, which takes them to the "Add New Info" screen (2) and allows them to input a new Lens (3), then add/remove their existing job history to the Lens (4 and 5), or create a new one to add (6) to it.
ADDING skills and endorsements
The screens below show the subtle modification of the Skills and Endorsements section - instead of a consolidated list under the Experience section, the user's skills are now linked to their job history, while retaining their endorsers ( and option to hide their endorsements) and the ability to add new skills to their experience.
final thoughts
LinkedIn Lenses was a self-directed project that was developed as an exercise in reinventing how we think about our professional histories. I think LinkedIn has the potential to emphasize users’ multitudes beyond the “now” and allow them to fully show what they are capable of, and looking at my friends and community with their multi-faceted talents and non-linear career paths make me realize that we needed a more dynamic way of demonstrating our real-world experience.