Project Overview
LinkedIn is the go-to professional networking platform, boasting over 900 million users worldwide. While it excels as a job-searching tool, it lacks customization options for creative professionals, forcing them to rely on external platforms like personal portfolios or GitHub repositories to showcase their work.
This case study explores how LinkedIn can improve its portfolio features to better support professionals in visually showcasing their work, making the platform more inclusive for creatives.
Tools: Figma, FigJam, Photoshop, Illustrator, Optimal Workshop, Pen & Paper
Timeline: Three-week sprint
My Role
UX Research & Strategy
Interaction & UI Design
Design System Development
Prototyping & Proof of Concept
My Responsibilities
Conducted competitive analysis and user interviews to understand portfolio customization needs and pain points.
Developed the interactive prototype in Figma, translating concepts into a functional, testable experience.
Created a comprehensive design system in Figma, including UI components, tokens, and reusable assets to maintain consistency and efficiency across the prototype.
Translated the proposed modular profile editing system into an interactive Figma prototype, proving its feasibility and usability within LinkedIn’s ecosystem.
Understanding the Problem
The Limitations of LinkedIn for Creative Professionals
Despite its dominance in professional networking, LinkedIn’s rigid structure creates challenges for designers, videographers, writers, and other creatives who want to showcase their work.
Common pain points include:
Limited customization – Users cannot tailor how their portfolios appear, leading to a generic, impersonal presentation.
Lack of native media support – LinkedIn primarily supports text-based content, making it difficult for creatives to display visual, auditory, or interactive projects.
Reliance on external platforms – Many professionals are forced to link to external sites, increasing friction and reducing engagement within LinkedIn.
Research Goals
We focused on three primary questions:
1️⃣ What challenges do creative professionals face when showcasing their work on LinkedIn?
2️⃣ How do competitors address portfolio customization, and where does LinkedIn fall short?
3️⃣ What solutions could improve LinkedIn’s portfolio features while maintaining platform consistency?
User Research & Insights
User Interviews: Identifying Pain Points
To better understand user needs, our team conducted six in-depth user interviews with creative professionals who use LinkedIn. We spoke with:
UX Designers
Cinematographers
Software Engineers
Tech Recruiters
Each interview focused on how users currently showcase their work, their frustrations with LinkedIn, and what improvements they would like to see.
Key Takeaways:
Creatives feel constrained by LinkedIn's rigid structure, limiting how they present their skills.
Many users rely on external portfolio websites, disrupting the seamlessness of LinkedIn’s professional ecosystem.
Recruiters struggle to assess creative work on LinkedIn, as there are no clear ways to highlight portfolio projects beyond posts or external links.
How This Informed Design
✔ Prioritized modular portfolio sections as a way to enhance customization options.
✔ Designed a seamless integration with LinkedIn’s existing profile structure to maintain usability.
✔ Introduced expanded media support for images, videos, and interactive content within LinkedIn profiles.
Market & Competitor Research
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
To identify potential solutions, we analyzed how various job search and networking platforms support creative professionals. While my team focused on portfolio platforms like Behance and Dribbble to examine their tools and features, I conducted an in-depth analysis of Xing.com, Indeed.com, and LinkedIn itself. My research aimed to evaluate each platform's strengths and weaknesses (Pluses & Deltas), compile a feature inventory, and assess user task flows.
Key Insights I Discovered:
Xing.com (A localized competitor with strong networking features) |
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✅ Pluses:
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❌ Deltas:
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Indeed.com (A job board with extensive search functionality) |
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✅ Pluses:
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❌ Deltas:
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LinkedIn (The go-to social networking platform for job hunting) |
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✅ Pluses:
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❌ Deltas:
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How This Informed Design
✔ Identified gaps where LinkedIn lags behind competitors and areas of opportunity.
✔ Prioritized native portfolio features, minimizing reliance on external tools.
✔ Balanced LinkedIn’s strengths (networking, recruitment) with new customization capabilities.
Synthesizing Research into Design
To bridge the gap between LinkedIn’s current limitations and the needs of creative professionals, we synthesized our research findings into actionable insights. Through affinity mapping and competitive analysis, we identified key pain points in how users interact with LinkedIn’s profile editing system.
Affinity Mapping
Highlighted Insights:
Key Takeaways:
Customization Limitations: Users expressed frustration with LinkedIn's rigid profile structure, limiting creative self-expression.
External Portfolio Reliance: Many professionals host their portfolios on external sites like Behance, Wix, or GitHub due to LinkedIn’s lack of robust display options.
Search & Discoverability Issues: Recruiters and potential collaborators struggle to find creative professionals based on their work rather than job titles.
Content Overload & UI Confusion: Some users felt overwhelmed by LinkedIn’s interface, making it difficult to find relevant opportunities or effectively showcase projects.
User Persona
Based on research, we developed a persona representing creative professionals facing these issues using LinkedIn:
Morgan Hernandez – The Creative Professional
Age: 35 | Location: Mountain View, CA
Background: Transitioned into design from an unrelated field, building their portfolio from scratch.
Goals & Needs
Maintain a clear, engaging LinkedIn profile.
Showcase their work natively, without external sites.
Pain Points
Lack of customization makes portfolios feel generic.
Struggles to highlight creative projects on LinkedIn.
Streamlining the Profile Editing Experience
One of the most significant pain points uncovered in our research was the fragmented and inconsistent experience of editing a LinkedIn profile. Users were overwhelmed by multiple entry points to profile editing, scattered across various sections. Instead of a centralized editing interface, LinkedIn forces users to navigate multiple individual edit buttons, leading to decision fatigue and inefficiency.
Before: Fragmented Editing Experience 🔎
Users had to edit different sections individually rather than in one streamlined view.
Multiple buttons with different purposes (e.g., “Add Profile Section,” “Enhance Profile,” etc.) caused confusion.
No cohesive editing experience—users had to hunt down specific editing tools just to make minor updates.
Solution: A Centralized Profile Editor 📌
To address these frustrations, we proposed a unified profile editing experience. Instead of forcing users to navigate multiple entry points, we needed to plan a design of a single, full-page editing interface that allows users to manage all profile sections—including their portfolio—with one main point of entry.
This shift should reduce cognitive load, minimize unnecessary navigation, and enhance usability—creating a more efficient and intuitive workflow for users.
How This Informed Design
✔ Introduced modular portfolio sections to provide greater customization.
✔ Designed a visual-first content layout to better showcase creative work.
✔ Streamlined profile navigation to reduce UI friction and content overload.
Design Phase: From Research to Implementation
With a clear understanding of user needs and pain points, we transitioned into ideation and wireframing. Our goal was to develop a streamlined, customizable solution that would integrate seamlessly into LinkedIn’s existing interface while enhancing creative portfolio display.
Ideation & Sketching
Using insights from our research, we conducted a collaborative Design Studio session to explore potential solutions for improving profile customization.
📝 Key Activities:
Each team member sketched potential solutions for enhancing profile editing.
We used voting stickers in FigJam to identify the strongest ideas.
Prioritized concepts that addressed user pain points, such as profile editing complexity and limited creative display options.
Key Features Prioritized
✔ Modular profile sections – Allow users to rearrange portfolio content dynamically.
✔ Live preview mode – Enables users to see their edits before publishing.
✔ Expanded media support – Accommodates GIFs, interactive prototypes, and high-resolution images.
After our Design Studio Session, we refined our initial sketches into low-fidelity wireframes. These wireframes helped us visualize key interactions and test layout structures before moving forward.
Once we reviewed and iterated on these wireframes, we worked together to build them out into mid-fidelity versions, preparing the foundation for our interactive prototype. This prototype was crucial for usability testing, allowing us to validate our design decisions before refining the final solution.
From Wireframes to Prototypes
Building a Scalable Design System
To ensure consistency and efficiency across our prototype, I developed a comprehensive design system in Figma. This system established reusable components and UI tokens, allowing for rapid iteration while maintaining a polished visual identity.
Key Elements of the Design System:
✔ UI Design Tokens – Defined variables for color, spacing, typography, and states (e.g., hover, active, disabled)
✔ Prototype Interactions – Boolean states and interaction strings to manage UI behaviors
✔ Reusable Components – Buttons, icons, form fields
This ensured my team could focus on their research and usability testing, knowing that when we moved into prototyping, all design system elements would be ready—allowing them to seamlessly construct their assigned pages without worrying about visual consistency or component fidelity.
Drag & Drop Bento-Style Prototyping
To maintain a cohesive design language while allowing each team member to contribute their own page, I developed a modular drag-and-drop prototyping system in Figma.
Rather than design sections manually for every screen, I created pre-formatted empty containers designed for stacking elements. These containers acted as flexible building blocks, allowing my team to construct feed layouts, profile pages, and portfolio sections efficiently.
I accomplished this by designed a library of reusable UI elements, including:
Multiple image placeholders (for different content types)
Various text and heading components (for posts, bios, and descriptions)
Interaction elements (like reaction bars, comments, and share buttons)
Pre-configured layout templates combining text, images, and galleries
📌 Check out the video below to see the modular system in action!
This additional system allowed us to quickly piece together high-fidelity prototypes while ensuring visual consistency across our individual contributions.
Final Prototype & Takeaways
With insights from usability testing, we refined our prototype to ensure a seamless profile customization experience.
The Final Design Introduced
✔ A centralized "Edit Profile" mode, consolidating scattered customization options into one intuitive interface.
✔ Drag-and-drop modular sections, allowing users to organize portfolio content effortlessly.
✔ A real-time preview feature, ensuring confidence before publishing updates.
While the prototype did not include the drag-and-drop aspect itself, the design shows the intended use by adding the "click and drag" handles on each content box. You can view our prototyped simulation of this interaction here: Interaction Demo. Our design solution streamlined creative self-expression on LinkedIn while improving discoverability for recruiters and collaborators.
Reflections & Next Steps
This project reinforced the importance of balancing user needs with platform constraints.
Key Lessons Learned
✔ Choice can be overwhelming – Reducing decision fatigue was critical to usability
✔ Iterate often – Frequent testing helped us refine the design based on real user behavior
✔ Scalability matters – A flexible design system ensured consistency while allowing customization
Moving forward, this system could expand beyond LinkedIn, offering a universal modular editing framework for personal branding across platforms.
Interactive Prototype
Please enjoy the prototype below to see the solution in action.
Click here to request a copy of the Figma file.
Note: The prototype works best in full screen mode; active elements can be identified by clicking anywhere on the screen to reveal blue highlight boxes.
Follow these steps to navigate through the prototype:
1️⃣ Navigate to the user's profile
2️⃣ Edit the profile
3️⃣ Add a new section
4️⃣ Choose a "Project" module
5️⃣ Save and/or publish the changes
Interactive Prototype
This prototype was designed for desktop view and cannot be viewed from a mobile device. Please visit this page on a computer or a device with a larger screen.