Episode 93. Review of The New LinkedIn App….or Crap?

News

 

• The new mobile seems to be getting decent reviews but these are from people who rarely use LinkedIn and are therefore not able to see it’s faults.
• Linkedin recruit 100 new people in Dublin and manage to persuade the Taoiseach Enda Kenny to attend an event at their offices by persuading his office that Dublin was LinkedIn’s ‘worldwide headquarters!

 

Commentary

• LinkedIn new iOS mobile app review
  • First impressions of the app are really good, the design is more modern and the navigation looks more intuitive.
  • The app is split into five sections.

Here you will see status updates and publish posts from your connections and those you follow as well as sponsored updates.

Unfortunately you cannot change from the algorithm driven order to ‘recent’ updates as you can on the desktop version.

This means that you see updates from 15 days ago, then one from 3 minutes ago followed by one posted 20 minutes ago. The order is supposed to be tailored to your needs and interest and I guess we will be able to train the algorithm to be more accurate through our actions but as things stand, my updates were pretty poor. The app updates are also completely different to the order of the desktop ones (that was also the case with the old app).

I noticed that every time I opened the app the second update I saw was always a sponsored advert. This is a significant increase over the amount of advertising we saw in the previous app.

At the top of the homepage you can see links to share a status update or a photo, As with the desktop version the share option also allows you to add an image therefore making it pretty much the same thing!

‘Image updates are broken’

I found it's extremely difficult to successfully post an image update. When tapping on ‘photo’ and selecting an image from my phone (taken with the phones camera) the app just hung for along time before it eventually informing me that the upload was unsuccessful.

I did eventually managed to post a more simple image via ‘share’ but not before posting the same update five times!

I made this short video showing exactly what the problem was

In the top right corner of the home page you can see 9 dots in a square, tap on this to reveal the ‘other apps’ feature which allows you to seamlessly open LinkedIn’s other apps.

Note how the Connected app is missing from the list. Could this be an indication that Connected and it’s desktop cousin ‘Contacts’ are soon to be retired? It wouldn’t surprise me.

The Sales Navigator and Recruiter apps are also missing but this may be because they are premium accounts.

LinkedIn’s strategy has always been to produce multiple apps covering specific areas rather then have one app try to do everything and this feature nicely brings it altogether, this works well with iOS 9 which allows an easy return to the last app used.

On a more positive note they have corrected the issue that meant you could only @mention people by their full name.

I always thought it was very odd to refer to someone you know in an update - your own or commenting on theirs by their full name such as

“You make a good point Teddy Burris”

As opposed to the more natural

“You make a good point Teddy”

It’s these apparently small details that make all the difference, especially when they involve communication.

You have always been able to do this on desktop, now you can on mobile.

My final observation is also a positive one in that you can hide updates from people who post irrelevant things in your stream (quizzes, irrelevant images and posts in a foreign language).

Simply click on the three small dots on the top right of the update;

This then reveals three options as shown below;