Redesigning the content-sharing experience on LinkedIn Feed
ROLE: DESIGN LEAD | DURATION: SIX MONTHS
Reshares are an integral part of the feed ecosystem on LinkedIn, making up 45% of the content. Reshares are an essential stepping stone to original creation: 1 in 4 resharers become original creators. I worked on two significant initiatives to overhaul the reshares experience.
Improving the reshares creation and consumption UX
Reshares social proof on posts: driving share behaviour through mimicry
Improving the reshares creation and consumption UX
Members use reshares to do several jobs:
Help my friends/coworkers achieve their goals
Advocate for causes I care about
Earn goodwill and a positive reputation
Demonstrate expertise
Build a professional narrative
Member Problem
A strong sentiment from creators that reshares “don’t work.”
We learnt from data science that
Reshares receive 63% fewer views and 80% fewer responses than original posts.
While 45% of the content, reshares only makeup 10% of feed posts viewed.
70% of reshares do NOT have commentary
Solution
OVERHAULING THE END-TO-END RESHARES EXPERIENCE
Product Strategy
We focused on solving the Shares Without Commentary case first since:
It makes up the lion’s share of share volume today, and
Through research, we found out that members have voiced that the lack of commentary is often intentional.
CURRENT DESIGN
Hypotheses
Reshare attribution (engagement on original post vs reshared post) is unclear and confusing to members.
When members do not opt to add additional commentary, they want to simply re-broadcast the original content.
When members have a new perspective to add to an existing piece of content, there is a high cognitive load for the viewer to understand the flow of the conversation.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
ITERATE
Creation flow explorations that were done by the previous designer before I joined the project.
Content Design was key to the experience
We realized early in the process that the copy could make or break the experience. Hence, we partnered closely with a Content Designer to craft the copy, and A/B tested several options with members.
After an extensive content design exercise, the team aligned on the word Repost. This distinguished in-platform content posting or reposting from sharing externally.
Stitching together the complete experience
FINAL DESIGN
Consumption Experience
Today, creating a repost without commentary leads to very little if any engagement. This can discourage would-be creators from sharing again in the future.
For viewers, today’s blank repost isn’t interesting to look at. Part of the hypothesis is that surfacing the original post instead will be more engaging.
Notification
This notification demonstrates to reposters the value of putting the spotlight on the original creator.
When your followers see a post because of your repost and go on to like or comment on the root post, we’ll notify you of that activity.
This is intended to spark curiosity to return to the conversation, see what’s been happening, and check-in.
Reposts social proof on posts
Driving share behaviour through mimicry
As part of a more significant company effort to drive creator growth, we identified a new form of social proof in showing members the reshare counts on feed updates. This additional social proof helped demonstrate the norm that members reshare content from their feed, and it resulted in sitewide creator growth by growing the volume of reshares. This is an excellent example of mimicry.
Impact
We saw an outsized impact as we grew net content sharers by 2.36%, power creators by 2.51%, and a significant sessions lift.
Subsequently, we built a landing experience from the root post where members can view and engage with
RESHARES LIST ON POSTS
MVP Experience
✨ Challenges and learnings along the way ✨
💡 Members want to engage with the reshares, but adding social actions on a desktop modal is complex
Commenting and reposting have usability and implementation challenges in a modal. We simplified the modal actions and redirected them to the feed detail page for the others.
💡 Partnership with Data Science
Close collaboration with Data Science helped us set up different creation and consumption experiences experiments and ensure that we learned about the impact of both the experiences.