LinkedIn is a job seeking portal that helps you find internships, jobs and make connections with other people and recruiters in your field. Users can access groups and pages that provide job openings and inspiration relating to their field. Career seeking aspirants are able to showcase their skills and prior work experiences for the employers to be able to easily discover them. It has a modern layout that is easy to use and understand.
Home Page
The buttons on the home page for like, comment, repost and send, show knowledge in the world. They are signifiers that afford clicking. It works well with the users’ conceptual models. And once the user clicks on them, it gives immediate feedback to the user as shown in Figure 2.
The Follow button shows clear discoverability. There is also a clear discoverability of the count of likes, reposts and comments. As well as clear discoverability of who of your connections commented on the post as shown below.
There is a top section above the posts that shows who liked the post from your connections. But the three dots beside it confuse users, whether if it’s for the post or for the connection that has liked the post. There should be separate buttons for both the sections. Like adding three dots on the post section as well as shown in Figure 6 for clear mapping between the button and its respective content.
The bio page lacks tags like About, Featured, Activity, etc. and users need to scroll till the end to see different sections of the bio. The solution would be to add the tags for easy navigation between sections as shown in Figure 9 for good discoverability and easy access and at the same time maintaining consistency with the other tags in the application.
To search for a person working in a particular company, one needs to search the name and then go to People and swipe till the “Current Companies” tag to search for the person in that company by selecting/typing that company name. If one clicks on “Companies”, companies with that name will reflect. This feels like a mistake to the user. It creates a gulf of execution. To solve this, the user should be able to type their name as well as the company name on the main search bar to easily filter out the searches. Figure 9 shows a signifier (company icon) to solve this.
Jobs Page
The job page shows clear consistency in terms of the name of the role, company name and location. It shows cues like “Be an early applicant” or “You’d be a top applicant” which shows good feedback for the applicants in their application process.
Don Norman’s seven stages of action are followed while using the application. Let’s take the example of applying for a job.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is an intuitive app and has many features. It is used extensively by people across the world as it serves as a one stop solution for all job-related tasks. However, it does have certain issues in usability in terms of ease of finding people, lack of navigation tags, etc. Overall, the application highlights the main aspects of job-seeking.