LinkedIn has finally launched its rebuilt mobile app for Android and iOS. It promises a faster, more streamlined experience of the professional networking site. The app has reportedly been rebuilt from scratch to provide a user interface more in line with other social apps such as Facebook.
The new app now acts as an 'app launcher' for dedicated experiences like Pulse, Groups and JobSearch. You’ll now have five main areas within the app – Your Feed, Me, My Network, Messaging and Search.
Here is a description of the five main areas:
Your Feed (Home) is content from your network to help with your professional day. It’s based on what we determined is most relevant for your industry, function, and skills combined with what conversations and content you care about. For the first time, as part of a lightweight on boarding process, we are going to ask you what content you are interested in, and over time you can also unfollow things that are less valuable to you.
Me represents your professional brand. This is where you can see all things about you — who’s viewed your profile, who is commenting on, or sharing your posts. It also offers the most intuitive way of updating your profile that we have ever had, so you can easily spruce up your professional profile to keep things fresh.
My Network is a daily briefing of what’s happening in your professional network, so you can see in second’s people you may know, new posts from your network and suggestions to keep connected. For example, it will offer prompts to say congrats to a connection celebrating a new role or work anniversary, or send a message to someone in your network when they have written a post on LinkedIn.
Messaging abandons email in favour of a more casual way to stay in touch, allowing you to initiate quicker conversations in a lighter-weight interface. This makes it easy for you to ping someone in your network on a quick question or continue a conversation as you would in real-life.
Search is now 300% faster, and a lot smarter, so you can quickly find people, jobs and groups you’re looking for.
Overall the app appears to be a solid attempt to move their user experience towards something more akin to Facebook. Ditching email in favour of messaging indicates they are seeking more immediate interactions through the site. Having instant messages should help them achieve more 'stickiness' - keeping users logged in and engaged for more of the time. The streamlined and tailored content in your news feed should also help sort through the barrage of updates.
There is no word on an updated Windows Phone or indeed a Universal Windows 10 app. Considering Windows is the dominant business computing platform, it’s perhaps time LinkedIn released a dedicated app?
Let us know what you think of the update in the comments.
Source: LinkedIn
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