Design by accretion

The student mini-program — launched in 2020, struggled to adapt to the hyper-growth of the business and student users. As time flies by, we received enough feedback on our MVP version of the student mini-program. We reframed our mission as helping students plan their careers and connect them with professionals. The main challenge I face is that most student users were unable to identify the value of the student app and have no idea of how to use it to achieve success in their career. To convey the key values of the LinkedIn student app, I designed the homepage of the mini-program.

My Role

I was responsible for the student career development product, shipping several successful new experiences.

Project Team

Product designer(sole), 2 product managers, 2 digital operations, 1 data scientist, and 4 developers.

Project status

🚀 Launched in Sep, 2021

What I did

Research
Product vision & strategy
Feature Prioritization
Design principle
Brainstorming
Homepage Design
User Testing
Patterns, and best practices documentation.

If you are familiar with mini-program, feel free to skip this intro.

Skip

Background

What's a mini-program?

Mini Programs are 'mini-applications' built within the WeChat platform that doesn't need to be downloaded or installed. WeChat allows 3rd party companies to develop Mini Programs providing advanced features to users that can run within WeChat.

Why do we want to onboard LinkedIn on WeChat mini-program?

WeChat is now a very important channel for brand, product, marketing, and operation teams in China. WeChat platform is eaiser for users to share LinkedIn profiles and valuable contents.

WeChat users check messages from time to time. They can receive messages from LinkedIn if they linked WeChat and LinkedIn account. So, there is a higher rate for them to come back to LinkedIn whenever receiving messages and notifications. WeChat also provides a chance for sharing LinkedIn’s marketing campaigns or valuable contents. Existing users can bring lots of new sign ups through viral sharing.

Notification to promote retention

Viral sharing

Students as Target Users

The student cohort is our main strategy this year in China. From our former research, students are a special group of users who are eager to learn and who are at the beginning of shaping their career paths. If they get into the habit of using LinkedIn as a tool for their career choice, they will be potential future professionals on LinkedIn.

Context

We customized a number of features based on the needs of the student cohort. A lot of students don’t know how to approach getting a job. We help students understand the importance of reaching out to alumni/mentors to get more information around a role or company and potentially a job. Also, we surface career / job related Q&As for them to read to help guide them through the job seeking process.

Why do we decide to design a new homepage for LinkedIn mini-program?

Within the product vision, we have reframed our mission to help students plan their careers and connect them with professionals. The student mini-program MVP — launched in 2020, struggled to adapt to the new mission.

As time flies by, we've received enough user feedback on our student mini-program MVP. If the user wants to know the whole mini-program, they have to browse all the tabs, which requires extra effort to get the value of LinkedIn.

From quantitative data, the click through rate on the homepage is far more than others, while the drop-off rate is also far more than others. Student users usually stop at finding alumni (the homepage)

Providing key values on the homepage is necessary to keep students retained and serve them better.

The Challenge

Vague direction

At the beginning of the product scope change, we did not yet have a specific plan on how to help students succeed in planning career. Under the myriad of uncertainties, it is difficult to create an extensible homepage design. Uncertainty mainly comes from the following aspects.

📱 From the product side, we can provide ? product value to our users to realize our product success.

👩‍🎓 From the end user side, users need ? to realize their career success.

The conflict between the business and the user experience

The student mini-program — launched in 2020, struggled to adapt to the hyper-growth of the business needs. Each business pillar required a special space on the homepage to maximize business value. However, commercial campaigns are not the user's purpose. They required efficient, worthwhile, content and services inside the mini-program.

Feedback management

The biggest challenge I faced throughout the project was the difficulty of managing feedback because it involved every part of the business and cross functional stakeholders. The team spent a disproportional amount of time debating design directions of the mini-program— when there wasn’t data that could easily be gathered to help drive a decision.

I observed this pattern early on in the project and invested time in creating documentation to help alleviate the data crutch and better articulate and distribute design rationale. Completing this work ahead of schedule is time-consuming, but saved a lot of back‐and‐forth as the project progressed.

How I got there

Who are our target users?

Target users are:

Students who are looking for a job or preparing for work
New to LinkedIn
Not only top schools are included, but also average schools.

Understand the pain points of the target students

Given the myriad of uncertainties, I first referred to some UER reports about students. The biggest pain points are career choices, lack of job-related information and network building. They are also psychologically stressed when they consult a mentor.

Align with stakeholders

Considering the pain points of users, I discuss them with different stakeholders about our opportunities. This helped me think about the goals of the project from user experience, product, and marketing perspectives and translated them into my design goals.

So I defined my design goal correspondingly.

Move forward with designs

One of my biggest challenges was finding the right direction while collaborating with a wider team. I needed to get buy-in from end users, product partners, marketing and engineer teams. Design principles and the information prioritization framework helped increase visibility into my decision‐making process and galvanize the team to share in the vision.

Design principles — guide our team towards making appropriate decisions

Clear

Make sure the structure is clear and reasonable

Relevant

Be relevant to users' intent and help get what they want

Trustworthy

Close the gap between students and professionals

Scalable

Scalable connection between the future and the present

Information prioritization — What could be the best for product and end users?

My earliest design challenge was to propose what information could be displayed on our homepage for members and guests. To get started, I went through the current features and prioritized top ones according to value, feature maturity, popularity, and update frequency.

Information Prioritization

Mentor/mentee is a very unique and differentiated value for LinkedIn and have received good feedback in previous user interviews. We debated between alumni and the Q&A feature, which are both useful for students. Q&A content is consumable, it has more liquidity, while finding alumni does not bring constant value. Based on research findings, students are eager to learn about work-related information, so I hypothesized Q&A content will be more popular and bring constant values to students. Finding jobs is a rigid demand, but less frequent. The live feature is immature. So they are not selected on the homepage this time.

Design

The framework

What the framework presents is not very appealing and represents the worst perception. But at least our priorities had been basically set and I could focus on exploring possibilities at a more detailed level.

Envision a better future

I held a brainstorming session with 5 cross-functional partners to paint a big picture of the Mini Program and see what the possibilities are in the near future.

Brainstorming ( ~ 60 min )
5 cross functional partners
• Engineers
• Product Managers
• Designers

Considerations
• How to solve students’ pain points?
• What could be achieved in the near future?
• How to deal with students unmet needs?

We created a prioritization matrix to screen out ideas that would have a large impact and less effort as short-term alternatives. Although many of these concepts were not feasible at the time of launch, they were still important to help get the team excited about the future of the student mini-program.

Visionary design alternatives

To have a visionary view of the Mini-program and its homepage, I explored design solutions based on brainstorming ideas. Then I picked out the following ideas after discussing with my PM partners.

Solve the conflicts

Each business pillar required a special space on the homepage to maximize business value. The homepage carries the burden of communicating differentiated values and maximizing engagement. Although business is chasing commercial interests, it must be balanced with user value, and the so-called balance is a win-win situation, otherwise the campaigns and ads are failures. So, how to integrate business needs such as marketing campaigns or advertising into our product?

Multiple promotion slots are better than carousel banner slots to ensure the communication rate, so that activities can be fully displayed to users and made users perceive.

Multiple promotion slots are conducive to the comparison of operational effects, thereby providing data support for future operational activities. Analyze and compare which operation slot has the best effect, so as to indirectly know which operation slot is more easily accepted by the user.

Test our assumptions

We made some assumptions about what would bring the most value to users and tested how they perceived and used the homepage. I created a testing plan to guide the whole research.

Goals:

A. Understand user needs and feature preferences

1. The user's current or potential needs
2. User affinity for the current features (existed and the new design)
3. Preferences and tendencies for future directions (Concepts)

B. Test the new version of the homepage design

1. Understand the positioning and perception of the product
2. Usability

Testing plan

Within the limited time and resources, I recruited students from different universities on "Visiting Days" to save time and effort. With the help of research and design colleagues, we successfully completed the research.

Methodology

5 participants, 1:1 interviews

45 minutes per session. Interview & observation.

All features & New homepage

Test with different ideas

Hear from users

The refinement

Although the concept of "stage customization" won praise, we did not launch this feature due to the impact of guest user identity information on the accuracy of recommendations and the limitations of engineer resources. Students say talking to mentors is stressful, but alumni bring each other closer and increase trust. Therefore, I hope that "talking to alumni" can serve as a starting point for communication.

Bring it to life

The gallery below shows the detailed design for the homepage and its interaction with other features.

Results

Within the limits of the sample size and confidence level of scientific experiments, I discussed with DS and finally identified metrics that would help lead to conclusions. Under the constraints of limited sample size, we estimated the p-value (<0.05) to ensure statistic significance so that we can launch the first AB Testing on LinkedIn Mini-program. we set total CTR and drop-off rate as metrics to ensure practical significance. Finally, our results had a p-value<0.05 and Z score>1.96.

Core metrics

Findings

CTR of Q&A is the highest, mentor section is the lowest
- Verified our assumptions

Mentor/mentee is a low frequency need
- High cost for time and effort
- Culture difference/Social anxiety

The value brought by alumni should not be underestimated. (A/B test)
- Guest users interact less with the new homepage. ‘Find Alumni’ satisfies their curiosity. (hypothesis)
- In the Chinese market, students have great trust in alumni, and most of their sources of career information come from the senior students of the university (UER)

Reflections

Homepage design

Homepage design is never an easy task. The perspectives of users, product vision, marketing, development, and resources are all things to consider. But the most important thing is that the homepage should focus on the core values that your app offers, because that's why users come.

In the homepage I designed, Q&A contains many special tips for students' career development that can be easily and consistently consumed. Mentor, while a low-frequency feature, is also popular with students and is very useful. Those will become the reason why students come.

Qualitative data helps us understand why students view alumni as their most important resources in job seeking. Quantitative data tells us how important it is.

Design tips

Designers need to interpret data on their own and objectively justify their design decisions whenever possible.

Designers are engaged by empathy, envision a better future and paint the picture for others Designers serves an essential role of imaging and illustrating that there is a better way to get people excited to blaze that new trail together.

Take the team on the journey instead of teleporting them directly to the solution, which could save a lot of back-and -forth.

Thanks!