LinkedIn's promise

Pretty much all my business friends are on LinkedIn. According to Read Write Web, LinkedIn has around 20 million members and around 6.6 million monthly active users. They are the clear global market leaders in the business networking space—Centre Networks report that Xing, their closest competitor, had 5 million members in January 2008.

So just what is it that LinkedIn is doing so right? And could it be doing that thing even better?

The LinkedIn promise

The heart of what makes a service or product successful is the power of the aspirations it evokes. Once we identify the core "promise" that the service holds out to us, we can then look at how effectively the its functionalities, workflows and UI amplify, filter and channel that promise into a rewarding and effective, tangible user experience (UX).

So what is LinkedIn's promise to its users?

First up, LinkedIn's self-avowed mission: "to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the relationships you already have". Hmm, not exactly snappy, eh? We're going to have to read between the lines and read the subtle cues here...

I would sum up my actual experience of using LinkedIn feels something more like this: "LinkedIn promises to bring my business card to life." LinkedIn seems to say to me: "we will extend your carefully-constructed business card and CV across your network for you, bringing you a wealth of serendipitous professional insights and opportunities."

So what, specifically, gives me this impression?

Visual branding—"corporate" and "creative" in counterpoint

LinkedIn's visual branding is deceptively subtle. At first glance, you might think it minimal and conservative. Lots of greyspace and whitespace around clean-edged boxes and tidy little icons; tightly controlled areas of colour.

But look more closely.

Within this conservative visual framework, there is actually a wealth of variety of gradient effects, block colour shades, corner shapes, button and border styles, list layouts. I can feel that the LinkedIn designers have had fun with this UI!

To illustrate my point, here's a collage of fragments from the LinkedIn UI. (See if you can find them on the site itself—a treasure hunt!):

But so what? What does the subtleties of graphic design have to do with LinkedIn's core UX?

Well, the "corporate yet fun" visual branding perfectly expresses the "double promise" of LinkedIn that I suggested above: that you can both keep firm control of how people perceive your identity while also benefiting in serendipitous and unexpected ways by expressing that identity. In my experience, those two attributes tap into fairly universal human needs, so it's no surprise that LinkedIn is so successful.

Genteel gameplay

If LinkedIn was a game, it would be one that you couldn't easily lose at.

As you build up the various aspects your profile, a little "profile completeness" status bar creeps up towards 100%. But there are no wrong moves or puzzling challenges in the profile building game—just the gentle incentive of that status bar and the hope that your contacts will view your professional identity in a better light and opportunities will flow.

By way of illustration, I found this image by blogger Stephanie Booth (though note also the somewhat disgruntled comment exchange under the original image!):



The status bar is classic LinkedIn. It says: "take your time, stay in control, just follow the instructions - but maybe, just maybe, this could lead on to unsuspected opportunities." That's a potent double promise.

Cherry picking the social web

It didn't escape observers' attention that the latest iteration of the LinkedIn site drew on key features of Facebook for inspiration - the Newsfeed on the Home page and the Questions and Answers features being two of the most conspicuous examples.

But even when cherry picking the "bleeding edge" of the social web, LinkedIn keeps its brand promise. The content of the Newsfeed is just interesting enough to attract a curious glance from time to time (e.g. "[Your contact's name] added [someone else] as a contact"), but never strays into embarassing or awkward territory.

I will never read a message like "[Your contact name] just got the sack and is now unemployed" on LinkedIn. Engaging and potentially useful to observers as that message would be, it would LinkedIn's implied promise to help you maintain a positive professional image.

LinkedIn sucks, but it shouldn't care

When I asked my social media maven friends to tell me how well LinkedIn worked for them, their reaction was mixed.

Here are a few of their twittered gripes:

"I find it takes too many clicks to see someone's connections. Also, interface isn't consistent." - Jof Arnold

"Always struck me as kind of thing that should be useful, but just not yet. Loathe to bail in case it's useful after I've gone." - Tim Duckett

"[J]ust an address-neutral repository of people I know, and an occasional source of annoying recruiters." - Alan Patrick

"LinkedIn would be cool if it had some decent apps..." - Steve Lawson

"It seems like it should be much more useful & effective than it is." - Pete Goold

So LinkedIn clearly isn't serving the early adopter crowd optimally, and I would imagine that must be impacting negatively on the amount of "buzz PR" they are getting on blogs, twitter, podcasts and so on.

But then again, why should LinkedIn care too much?

As I said at the beginning of this post, pretty much all my professional friends are on LinkedIn—despite their reservations about its utility. For early adopters, the bottom line is that LinkedIn works for them as a rolodex. And for those early adopters who aren't already maxed out with gainful employment, there is an additional hope (not necessarily expectation) that being on LinkedIn could generate new opportunities.

If LinkedIn jumped to the tune of every fleeting, outré social web trend in an effort to excite us early adopters, they would be breaking their brand promise of keeping the user in control of a dependable and familiar environment. They would risk alienating their mass market of late adopters.

And Reid Hoffman is far too clever to do that.

A message runs through it

If you've ever had the dubious privilege of eating a stick of Brighton Rock, you'll know that there's some message or other written pink or green into the white sugar, and that message goes through the length of the sweet.

Great brands are like that. Everything they do communicates their brand promise.

Of course, I could only touch on small areas and aspects of LinkedIn's web (and indeed mobile) presence in this post. But it seems to me that wherever I turn on LinkedIn, I encounter the same double promise of safety and opportunity.

It's a great lesson in business focus.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to all my friends who helped me to clarify my thoughts on LinkedIn by sharing their own. While we're on the subject, why not check out their LinkedIn profiles, via my own (requires LinkedIn signin)? Maybe, just maybe, it could lead to professional opportunities for you...

[UPDATE: Special thanks to Chris Osborne for pointing out an error in my LinkedIn statistics references—now corrected]