Overview

This is an independent project I did for LinkedIn. The prompt is to design a welcome back experience for a dormant user who is returning after 3+ months. The experience should be able to gain the dormant user’s attention and garner an action to actively participate on LinkedIn in any way.

With very limited time, I started off from user research, ideation, to wireframing and design iterations. The final design is a conversational onboarding experience that delivers the information people care about most in an engaging way, and garner interaction through friendly catch-up. You can view the prototype here.

• KEYWORDS | Welcome Back Experience, Design Thinking, Mobile Onboarding, Prototyping
• MY ROLE | Product Designer

Problem

LinkedIn is a network of over 440 million professionals. However, sometimes when members are happy in their current positions, they become dormant users and choose not to spend their time on LinkedIn.

As I start to approach this problem, 3 major components came to my mind: dormant user, returning, garner actions.

Dormant Users

The target users are LinkedIn users who are dormant for more than 3+ month. They already have a LinkedIn account, however they stopped using LinkedIn at a certain point. So the questions I have are:

• Why do they become dormant? The prompt suggests that it’s because they are happy with their current positions. But this is definitely a question to investigate.
• Who are they? What are their needs?

Returning

We want to design for returning customers. This means we target people who already have the intention of returning to LinkedIn. We don’t worry too much about how to bring people back in the first place, but focus on returning users.

• Why do they return?
• What do returning users need?

Garner Actions

We want to gain their attention and garner actions. In order to do so, we need to understand what they need, as well as what LinkedIn can offer.

• What do dormant & returning users need?
• What can LinkedIn offer?

Research

With those questions in mind, I conducted 3 kinds of research: 1) User Interview, 2) Social Media Research, 3) Product research.

User Interview

I’ve conducted 5 interviews with my friends who are currently living in US. A few more details about them:

• They are young professionals aged from 24 - 32
• They came from IT, Education and Finance industry
• They all use LinkedIn and they all had the experience of being dormant for a while and then come back

Talking with them validated some of my assumptions, and gave me some new insights:

Coming back for jobs vs Coming back for other reasons

The reason for people becoming dormant is similar: they enjoy their lives and are not looking for changes. The reasons for dormant users to come back are different, but the behaviors fall into 2 distinct scenarios: Returning for new jobs, Returning for other reasons.

• When people come back for new jobs, they have a clear path. For those who are actively looking, their path is: check job openings → Update Profile → Add connections/ Request recommendations. For those who are not actively looking, they may stay at the first step for long.
• When people come back for other reasons, they stay relatively short, and they leave after they finish their tasks. Those tasks include:
  • Check messages sent from recruiters/connections
  • View profile of a person (connection, interview candidate, industry expert, etc.)
  • Update profile (normally happens shortly after they just change jobs)
  • Check connections’ feeds (infrequent)

LinkedIn users have some common needs

Now we know that for people coming back for new jobs, they have clear and instant needs - new jobs, and they are more likely to engage longer with LinkedIn and become active again naturally. However, for people who come back for other reasons, what are their needs and what can keep them stay after they finish their tasks? From the research, I found out that people who use LinkedIn generally care about their career, and they tend to have strong motivation for Career Growth.

• LinkedIn users want to become better in their current position, in order to do so, they find the following valuable and helpful to them:
  • Build more connections
  • Learn more skills
• When it comes to career, people are easily inspired by people similar to them, and viewing other people’s career growth can inspire them significantly

Social Media Research

One problem with conducting user interviews is the small sample size. In order to feel more confident about the research findings, I spent a hour browsing carefully through my LinkedIn feeds back to long time ago, and found more interesting patterns:

• People update their major profile frequently (job, position). They update the detailed profile less frequently, and mostly when they are looking for new opportunities.
• Some senior level people become active again in LinkedIn because their teams are hiring new people.
• Some senior level people (CEOs of a company) are more likely to post & repost industry articles that are related to their company. To them, LinkedIn is not just about their personal brand, but also about their companies.

Personas

To synthesis those findings, I created the following personas:

Product Research

With the personas, I start to move into the mood of figuring out how to make those personas happy. Before start conceptualizing, I spent some time researching LinkedIn. Even though I use it frequently, this is a way to identify features that are unknown to users but can bring value to them. Also “welcome back” could be a review of FTU's onboarding experience, so it’s important that we treat them as a FTU. Here’s the list of the main features that LinkedIn is offering:

“Learning” stood out from this list, as it’s a relatively new feature that dormant LinkedIn users might not be aware of, and it could be interesting for people who want to do better in their careers.

User Scenarios & Work Flow

Knowing what users need and what LinkedIn could offer, now it’s time to consider how LinkedIn could meet their needs. I started drawing the user flow chart. The goal of it is to synthesis all the use cases and make sure to deliver the right experience at the right time for the right people.

A quick summary of the flow is: for passive returners, we should allow them to finish their tasks first, and then introduce the welcome back experience to them. For the active job hunters, we should load the welcome back experience once they launch the app.

Ideation

So now it's time for design! After identifying the user personas & scenarios, I started brainstorming design ideas, and here are 5 of my favorite ideas:

Concept1. Data Dashboard

The first concept is to show people some statistics / charts when they are back. The purpose is to make them feel that there are plenty of new interesting things happening at LinkedIn.

PROS & CONS:

• PROS: Strong visual potential
• CONS: Not appealing - Returning users don’t care about the total numbers, they are more likely to be attracted by specific information, e.g. who exactly gets a promotion, other than how many people got a promotion.

Concept2. Past memories

The second concept is to bring back old memories to the user, e.g. say things like “Haven’t seen you for 123 days. Before you left you added a new connection “Ricky Wang”.

PROS & CONS:

• PROS: Impress people emotionally
• CONS: Doesn't place emphasis on their professional needs.

Concept3. Just on Time

The idea is to make the current moment special by showing people latest updates from the job market and their connections, and really emphasize the timing by saying “Oh you are right on time for this new position from LinkedIn posted 2 days ago.”

PROS & CONS:

• PROS: Attractive to users
• CONS: High requirements on data.

Concept4. All About You

The 4th concept is “All about you”. The idea is to focus only on the returning user, and ask catching up questions like “how are you, what’s new?” It’s to mimic the experience when 2 old friends reunite and catch up.

PROS & CONS:

• PROS: people are interested in themselves
• CONS: It needs user’s involvement. They may feel lazy to interact

Concept5. Be Competitive

This idea is about being “competitive”. It is to use other people’s growth to motivate users to improve themselves.

PROS & CONS:

• PROS: People are easily inspired/motivated by other people, especially people similar to themselves
• CONS: It may make people feel inferior if they are not as good as their connections

After analyzing the pros and cons of all different concepts, I decided to build an experience that consists of 2 parts:

• Part 1. Job openings and connection's work updates. The job opening info is helpful for job hunters, while connections' updates could motivate passive returners to grow their career.
• Part 2. Catch-up interactions. This part will ask users some catch-up questions, and encourage them to interact with LinkedIn by answering those questions.

Wireframes

Feeling pretty happy about the concept, I did some wireframing to explore the potential layout and interactions. I've explored 3 major layouts :

V1. Horizontal Onboarding

The first one is similar to a standard onboarding experience. It presents one message at one screen, and the returning user swipes to view all the screens horizontally.

V2. Vertical Onboarding

The second one is an attempt to try something different. What if there is a stream to connect all the contents, and the returning user can browse through in a smooth way?

So I tried to arrange everything into a timeline, and the core of the timeline is the profile picture. User's own profile shows at the end of the timeline. Compared to the first one, this one is more smooth because it feels like one screen as compared to three in the first version.

V3. "Tinder"

This one goes wilder. What if all contents are organized as a pile of cards, and the user swipes each cards like Tinder and takes actions on them? The difficult part is that not all the screens need actions to take.

In general, my wireframing explorations allowed me to explore different interaction designs based on the general concept I have. My final design has combined all three versions together into a brand new experience.

Final Design

The final design combines the "conversation" from "Tinder" and the "timeline" from version 2, and it is also inspired by the latest Conversational UI trend. People are prompted with the content like the way they read new messages, and then interact with the app like having a conversation with it.

Content sent out as chat messages could potentially be more attractive than normal text. Also I tried to avoiding making it like a chatbot by not asking questions as chat messages, because it may bring people pressure and the fear of commitment.

Note that because of time constraints, I only made the hi-fi designs for the flow of Job Hunters. For Passive Returners, the welcome experience will come up after they launch the app for 1-2 minutes, and the screens and flows are the same.

Product Demo

Screens & Flow Detail View