Converting your LinkedIn profile into a visual journey
During my time at SlideShare we were gearing up to enter the content creation space. The start had to be a product that is simple and quick, gives users instant gratification, and keeps a high bar for design quality across devices.
Light on effort, rich in results
The question we started withHow do you design a content creation experience that is light in terms of cognitive load, while rewarding users with high quality results?
We weren't so sure about that at the time, but we were going to figure it out through a series of experiments, research interviews and design iterations.
People who had never uploaded before
The target audience was users who had not uploaded any slideshares in the past and could use a slight push towards a new way of creating and publishing content online, and potentially become regular uploaders.
SlideShare's user base was mainly students, scholars and professionals from all over the world, and there is one source of information common to all of them: their resumes.
Resumes are a rich source of professional data about an individual, and LinkedIn is the largest professional network, so using profile data to build an interesting visual story made sense.
Getting the hierarchy right
We interviewed HRs to get a sense of the right hierarchy of data in a resume. The result had to be highly creative, but also have a well defined structure to it.
The first step was categorising the data that comes in through the LinkedIn API. This mindmap helped get the structure right, and categorises the data based on insights from the interviews with the HR team.
It gave us a sense of the IA we were working with. The overall structure of this information was going to play a key role in the final result, and it was the first building block of the visual explorations to come.
Designing within a static player
The SlideShare player didn't display dynamic views. It was built with presentations in mind, which made it ideal for static data without any interactions.
For us this meant the final visualisation couldn't have hover states, animations, or information revealed through actions. These constraints shaped the early explorations: the focus was on laying out information in a flow, using creative timelines, shapes, charts and graphs.
Bringing the journey to life
While designing the static versions, we realised a truly engaging experience was possible if the theme was alive, built in markup and CSS/JS. Data could be laid out in many more interesting ways, multiple states could surface it, and animations could make interactions engaging.
The engineering team worked around this and modified the player code with a simple solution: a native HTML theme could now be loaded in an iframe and embedded in the player.
We moved on to prototyping solutions with multiple states. I started working on a concept that turns a LinkedIn profile into a playful landscape of your life, complete with an illustrated sky, clouds and peaks. Each key section of the resume maps to its own peak, and information is revealed through intuitive interactions.
Learnings from the UX interviews and the hierarchy of information shaped this layout as well. The relative heights of the peaks follow that IA, with experience as the most prominent one.
To keep the theme playful, I designed a night version. The professional journey switches to night mode automatically based on local time.
On mobile, the theme had to become a simpler experience that feels natural on a smaller screen with less processing power. My solution was a scrollable version where sections stack in the planned hierarchy, with animations limited to the clouds.
3× what we expected
Statistical analysis during project planning indicated that around 10K professional journeys would be created every month if the project was successful.
30K journeys were created in the first month after launch, crossing expectations by 3×.
