On the current LinkedIn platform, we found that 30% of searches that happen are for coworkers. The team believed that there was a great opportunity to create a product that can help people easily find and contact their coworkers. By leveraging working with companies and using their internal directory information such as org charts and projects and merging that with public LinkedIn dataset (i.e. education background, past work experience), we believe that we can create a very robust search and profile directory for our members.
This project was an incubator project, something the company wanted to test out to see if there was a market for. We operated as a small team, working fast, testing, and iterating to gain as much insight into this market.
I was the lead designer for this project. I worked closely with my product counterpart and engineering team to come up with strategy, concept, wireframes, research and full visual designs for this product. I worked on this project in 2014 - 2015.
"Why create a separate app from LinkedIn?“ This was one of the main questions that we got on the product team. At the time, the company had a multi app strategy, believing that each major task should have a dedicated app. The LinkedIn Lookup app would be to mainly serve for a better search and contact tool. Our main feature differentiators would be to allow users view coworkers in the same company without them showing up on Who’s Viewed My Profile, and allow for unlimited messaging to anyone at the company on Linkedin. It would also be limited to just people within their company.
Before diving too deep into the project, I set out to understand why they were looking for coworkers. I worked with our research partner to understand what fundamental pieces of information were found in corporate intranets and what information users were looking for on LinkedIn. I found out that users searched for coworkers on LinkedIn because it was easier, had more comprehensive data, and was more up-to-date, whereas corporate intranets were more limited but had vital information such as org charts, and desk location. All participants expected Lookup to be involved in an enterprise partnership with their companies to make full use out of this app.
We took extra time both for design and engineering to make sure that validation was simple and secure for our users. To establish trust and security with our users, we asked them to login with their work email system to create a closed ecosystem for their company.
LinkedIn Lookup sign up flow.
We designed the product around the employee, and based the designs around creating a great search experience on everything about that employee. We wanted to help our users find and contact users the fastest way possible, whether it be finding them by name, function, or skill. At the time LinkedIn search did not search all parts of your profile in this way. Our snippet search would eventually be leveraged across other LinkedIn products.
Search experience showing type ahead search, and full search results with search snippets.
For MVP, we leveraged a lot of the goodness of LinkedIn profiles. We striped down the LinkedIn profile to what the team believed was most important and hoped to integrate more company directory information such as org chart, desk location, and projects that employees are working on. I worked on many explorations of what types of information we could put in the profile, such as teams, projects, and org charts but eventually had to strip it out due to MVP constraints. I also added the check mark for members who downloaded the app to signal that they can receive LinkedIn messages without having to be connected and are active on this app.
Concept for new user profile.
Concept for complete employee profile.
We launched LinkedIn Lookup to the public, both iPhone and Android app as well as a beta desktop product. LinkedIn Lookup was featured on Apple’ app store and was used as LinkedIn’s internal directory on web and mobile before the Microsoft merger. We learned a lot about how this market worked, and what users were looking for. In the end, we recognized that for this product to truly be successful, we would need to have partnerships with companies to truly bring out the magic of the product.
From left to right: employee profile, skill search results, top app on Apple App store (business category).