Of the business-focused social networking web sites available today, LinkedIn has been invaluable in new clients finding me and helping me manage my network as colleagues advance throughout their careers.
As LinkedIn provides new reasons to draw its audiences back to its site, with such features as the Blog Link, the ReadingList by Amazon and others, it seems a few of these new features have been brought to market without fully considering how a typical visitor may actually use some of these features.
Specifically, I continue to shake my head with frustration almost every time I consider reading a discussion found in one of my Group Updates (screenshot below, names blurred by me).
Screenshot displays poor choice of clickable links
A quick glance at the screenshot reveals that the names of people commenting in each discussion, and the person who initiated the conversation, are bold and blue and when clicked, display the person’s public profile. Also clickable, though deprecated, are the number of comments found in the conversation.
The issue, of course, is that the conversation title is left unclickable. My only access to the conversation is via the comments link, which displays the last comment. In a conversation with multiple comments, the original question is off the screen, forcing the reader to scroll up to the top.
And while there is value in learning more about the people in shared group, that connection is likely ancillary to actually reading or joining the discussion. There’s a greater likelihood of someone wanting to read the profile of a person after he or she has already read that person’s response rather than blindly clicking the person’s name with little or no context.
While I admit there’s a possibility I expect a system with over 3 million users to accommodate me, I really don’t think that’s the case.
I’d love to hear a justification against an example as simple as this:
Discussion topic is first priority
Here I still have access to the profiles of people participating in the discussion, but I’m drawn to the conversation topic, now in blue and in bold.
When users scan the page, they are drawn to the bold names in the Connection Updates, and the conversations in the Group Updates–a contrast that can retain the user’s attention, not divert it.
Seems reasonable to me.
