So… dislike LinkedIn.

Actually, it’s not that I dislike it so much that I find it disappointing.

LinkedIn promises to be the social media hub of the professional world, where folks from across the globe, and from industries in all parts of the economy can come together to keep updated, network, and share knowledge. It’s where everyone thinks you need to be to keep up with your industry, meet new people in your field, and get headhunted for that dream job.

And yet, I never use it.

The reason is that LinkedIn has the most cluttered, claustrophobic and pushy user interface of any of the big social media sites. Every time I visit, I feel the ads and profile suggestions and calls to action bearing down on me to the point where I can’t spend more than a couple of minutes browsing without feeling the need to close the site in favour of something else — perhaps a white screen, containing a single word in Montserrat.

This feeling has led me to investigate how much better LinkedIn could be if it just chilled out a little.

Part One: The Current Situation

Below, you’ll see a screenshot of what my LinkedIn feed looks like when I type the address into my URL bar.

Right off the bat, LinkedIn is showing me a lot. They’re showing me ads, they’re showing me my profile, they’re showing me suggested connections.

Do you know what they’re not showing me? Any content.

In fact, I have to scroll past the ‘recommended jobs’ panel, than past another ad in order to see anything that resembles a social media post. Why does LinkedIn hide the content of its feed — the most visited part of its site by users — below two viewports worth of cruft?

The first rule of using a call to action is that your interface should have a call to action. As in one. This page seems to desperately want me to click on 20 different things, all unrelated and all taking me away from its users’ content.

Part Two: What Do You Want

Before having a look at some suggestions for a better LinkedIn, it’s worth having a quick look at what exactly LinkedIn and its users are trying to achieve.

What I Want:

Connect with colleagues

See interesting content

Learn about my industry

What LinkedIn Wants:

Ad revenue

Facilitate connections between professionals

Ad revenue

Screen-minutes from its users

Ad revenue

Be a hub for white collar jobs

Ad revenue

Although it would be easy for me to Photoshop all of the ads out and call it a day, I appreciate that this would be a risky move for LinkedIn — who were bought by Microsoft in 2016 for a shade over US$26 billion.

Part Three: A Better LinkedIn

I want to qualify this section of this article with the idea that the UI changes I’ve made in the screenshots below aren’t large ones. The steps to reducing the LinkedIn UI smother are fairly obvious ones — I just needed to know what LinkedIn could be like.

Plus, if LinkedIn wants a full UI rework from a dubiously qualified 22 year old, they can pay me full price.

Without further ado: here’s what I’d do LinkedIn’s feed if given five minutes alone with it.

Let’s go over some of the changes I’ve made.

Navbar:

I have removed some things from the navbar.

The ‘My Network’ tab’s sole purpose is to suggest connections to me. That already happens within my feed, so I never go there.

The ‘Messaging’ tab accomplishes the exact same thing as the messaging UI in the bottom right of the screen. Why have both in such prominent places?

I have removed the ‘profile suggestions’ bar. Not only had I completed these suggestions, they were taking up around a third of the on-load screen real estate.

Just in case LinkedIn’s CFO is reading, you’ll notice I’ve left plenty of space for ad placements, because I appreciate that LinkedIn needs to make a profit — I’ve just removed the unnecessary.

Conclusion

I think that LinkedIn has the potential to be the true hub for professionals — a place where real business people actually meet to connect and share knowledge for a purpose other than boosting their visibility to recruiters and mining backlinks.

I’ve shown in this article that with a few simple changes, the site could drastically improve its user interface, which would undoubtedly lead to increased session times, and thus increased incentives for people to spend their time creating content tailored to it.

I think there’s also a valuable lesson here for all of us who have a role in designing and implementing UI into software products. The pipeline of new features, new requirements and new revenue demands from our shareholders often has the power to make us forget that these features, requirements and ads will go unused and unseen if we don’t work to keep a lid on the visual clutter that comes with them. Periodic re-evaluations are necessary to ensure our users feel empowered by the work of developers — not drowned by it.