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Reinventing LinkedIn for iPad : A step forward or backward?

October 23, 2013

20131023-221404.jpg LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner announced Wednesday morning that the future of LinkedIn is mobile.

With 38% of LinkedIn’s unique visitors now coming from mobile, Weiner and company announced LinkedIn ‘Intro’ incorporating profiles into iOS email and major upgrades for its iPad and iPhone apps.

I am a big mobile user — and a heavy LinkedIn user. I no longer travel with my laptop (MacBook Air), nor do I take it home in the evenings or over the weekend. I use my iPad, because of its size and because the apps available on my iPad are far superior to the apps or browser experience on my laptop.

This included LinkedIn’s iPad app which was upgraded this spring for the first time in two years. A major upgrade which kickstarted everyone’s use of LinkedIn on the iPad, including mine.

So I was pretty pumped when I saw the upgrade available this evening. My initial response on using it was wow, an outstanding design and user experience that would further distance LinkedIn from any professional directory. A demonstration that it would be impossible for anyone to compete with the human and capital resources of LinkedIn — let’s just all agree to get its API for our own networks.

But as I started to use the iPad app as I use it to accept invitations and look up people, among other things, I found the features I needed were gone.

I take invitations to connect personnally. When someone asks to connect I look them up and if I accept I drop them a note through LinkedIn. I did that by just hitting the reply displayed in the invite.

I cannot do that anymore, I can only accept or reject. No reply offering anymore. The connection’s profile and invitation to connect disappear after I click accept.

The ability to make a real and personal connection – even to arrange to talk by phone or meet face to face dissapears. When I tried to search my connections the person I just accepted an invitation from wasn’t there – no way to drop them an inmail.

Connections presented another big problem. The iPad interface displayed 15 tiles of pictures and names, 5 in a row, 3 high. No navigation element to get to connections by location, tags, or even to a particular letter in the alphabet.

I have thousands of connections. I am now supposed to scroll through thousands of faces if I can not remember a person’s name and spelling to do a search? I have to be wrong, but I couldn’t find a work around. It feels like LinkedIn has been ‘Pinterest-ized’ at the expense of usability.

David Breger (@dbreger), as leader the tablet experience at LinkedIn, the details of the iPad upgrade that you blogged were compelling.

As I said, I loved the experience at first glance. But, it feels that those features that made your iPad the most compelling for me and others looking to make meaningful connections were gone.

What am I missing, David? Please don’t make me lug my laptop around the country.

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