Tom H. C. Anderson - More Than Market Research

I got up early today and hadn’t had my coffee yet when logging into Linkedin. In case you haven’t seen it yet, Linkedin launched a redesign last night. I would say it’s really just aesthetic, with no real new features.

The new site is different only in terms of navigation, making greater use of tabs and drop downs. They have also added a box on the left (actually just moved it from the bottom) to show your network profile snapshot, which is fairly unimportant info. In the lower right hand side they have added a couple optional search type widgets.

It seems that Linkedin engineers and market researchers don’t seem to know a simple usability and online consumer best practice principle. If you are going to do a dramatic site redesign which forces people to re-learn where things are, then you had better include some new powerful and interesting features as well.

-Tom