Great features for your users

How do you build features your users will love? What are your users already doing? Build features that enable them to do this task better.

LinkedIn recently released a feature that displays this principle perfectly. I’ll dissect it in this article.

Build features that replicate user behavior

Your users leave a trail.

The trail may look something like this: users typically land on the home page and sign in. Behavioral analytical tools like Hotjar allow you to view recordings of how your users move around from one page to another, or from one point to another.

If you notice that after signing up, users often navigate to your FAQ section, adding the FAQ section to the bottom of the sign-up page would:

• Decrease the number of clicks a user needs to make to reach the FAQ page;
• Increase the chances of the user clicking the FAQ page;
• Increase conversions from the FAQ page.

LinkedIn example: Building features for user’s trail

Typical LinkedIn user journey

A user sees a post from a mutual friend. If they like the post, they will click on the mutual friend’s profile to view their other posts.

Barrier: Some users may avoid this behavior because they don’t want to view their mutual friend’s profile (LinkedIn notifies users whenever someone views their profile).

How Linkedin solved this

They added a feature that provides additional information about a mutual friends whenever users read the mutual friends post (i.e when the user clicks the comment in a mutual friend’s post, for example).

In the example above I clicked on a post by a mutual friend, Zain. Additional information about the topics Zain writes about is displayed (“startups”, “marketing” and “psychology”). At other times, my mutual friend’s other posts will be suggested.

Essentially, what we see LinkedIn do here is:

• Analyze what user typically does on the app;
• Build a feature that helps the user complete that action easier.

Why build features that optimize the user’s behavior?

1. To make it easier for the user to complete the action

Rather than having to follow the typical, long path, now the user can complete their activity without any clicks.

An easier experience enhances the user’s satisfaction, and engagement. In the LinkedIn example, the user can decide instantly whether or not they want to follow a mutual friend.

The goal for us developers, PMs, and designers is to make it easier for the user to complete their goals. I’ve discussed this further in the article titled: How to build optimum user-centered websites.

2. Increases engagement

The previous user journey had a barrier (whenever the user views a mutual friend’s profile, the mutual friend gets notified of this behavior) which resulted in users churning.

This new feature removes the barrier, allowing users to successfully engage the mutual friend, and potentially even proceed to connect with the mutual friend.

Conclusion

A new feature that displays mutual friends’ posts automatically, as is discussed about LinkedIn in this article, enables users to complete their goal a lot easier.

But without viewing the existing patterns of users, the LinkedIn team would not have been able to diagnose the problem or solve it.

To truly understand the user, you need not only listen to what a user does. You need also to watch what they do and optimize for this activity.