New LinkedIn Design Launches

What a surprise this morning when I opened up my browser at work and discovered a new LinkedIn front page waiting for me. As someone who uses LinkedIn on a daily (hourly) basis this is good news as there were many aspects of the old format which were very frustrating to use. Let's run down the new features...

The biggest change in the new LinkedIn is the preference given to news stories. LinkedIn Today, the website's news aggregator, has been given a new magazine style look and is pinned to the top of your news feed when you first login. This is really big for people who use LinkedIn as a way of accessing news stories, blogs and business information. LinkedIn Today recognizes the important stories from your contacts and aggregates them in an easy to read format. The layout is very similar to many tablet and smartphone apps which present content in a magazine-like format. You can also predefine the industries and news you want to follow, or see suggestions about stories which may interest you, and save articles for later. 

Overall, the new features make using LinkedIn a little less onerous for power users. Hopefully this is the first step of many in which LinkedIn cleans up and organizes the amount of data/updates on the front page. For example, I still have to scroll to the bottom of my updates three times just to view stories posted a little over an hour ago. LinkedIn Today allows a user to get around this by creating a place to view news which was being lost in all the other updates being posted, but this may also make the front page news feed less important than it already was... 

What are your thoughts on the new LinkedIn design?

*Interested in using LinkedIn or learning how to maximize your online profile? Check our 3 part series on using LinkedIn to build a great profile and make connections.*