LinkedIn Is Gearing Up For A Redesign: Bigger Pictures, Anchored Menu (And A Life Less Tweeted)
LinkedIn these days may be the social network that is used most by those looking for a new job (and not the place to read tweets), but the company has long wanted to be seen as the place for a whole lot more …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is at least LinkedIn's second major surface overhaul in the corpus: back in December 2007 the company paired a platform launch with a full redesign and rolled out LinkedIn News on a reworked homepage, framing the site as a business network rather than a bare contacts database. The 2012 effort repeats that playbook — visual refresh plus navigation change — against the same standing problem the coverage names directly: users treat LinkedIn primarily as a job-seeking tool, not a place to read tweets or linger.
First-order effects
- Users landing on the redesigned site get a more image-forward feed and an anchored menu, changing how much screen real estate shared content commands versus profile and job-hunting functions.
Second-order effects
- By making the feed visually competitive with tweet-reading surfaces, LinkedIn pressures the perception — confirmed in its own positioning — that it is only visited when someone is looking for work, pushing engagement metrics toward daily-use territory that rivals own.
Third-order effects
- If each redesign keeps trading text density for imagery and persistent navigation, LinkedIn converges structurally with general-purpose social feeds, eroding the sharp line between professional utility and consumer social networking that defined its 2007-era identity.
The trend: Professional networks are steadily absorbing the visual-feed conventions of consumer social platforms in an attempt to convert episodic job-seeking visits into habitual daily use.