ACTIVE KNOWLEDGESEEKING

Help LinkedIn members find answers to everyday professional questions and get relevant knowledge from LinkedIn to solve their everyday work problems.

Team2 PM, 3 designers, 1 research, 1 pmm
RoleDesign lead
Active Knowledge Seeking — LinkedIn mobile screens showing Ask and search results

Planning and process

1

Discovery UXR

We ran UXR to learn how members are finding knowledge today.

2

Design exploration

I organized working sessions with partners to align on the problem and arrive at a solution we all liked.

3

Finalize design

I finalized designs and presented the experience as a platform-wide journey of members seeking knowledge to executive leadership.

4

MVPs

The project was split into many MVPs that were later built by specific teams.

Target users

Career Accelerators
Established Leaders

As a professional, I want to stay current on professional skills and knowledge and seek input from professionals on topics helpful to my work and career, so I can advance in my career.

How people find knowledge

  • Involves back and forth
  • Leverages multiple sources
  • Starts with vague intent that gets clearer by getting exposed to sub intents, related intents etc
  • It’s never about 1 question or 1 search, it is always a series of queries/questions
  • Leverages the results and recommendation to look at what is available and narrow it down
  • Involves hearing from trusted sources

Discovery

LinkedIn is not perceived as the place for Active knowledge seeking

Passive consumption

Current LinkedIn ecosystem only offers passive methods of consuming content

Knowledge seeking is based on discovery

Seekers can’t rely on LinkedIn because of the serendipity of the process

Seekers and Creators

Creators don’t know what seekers need, thus many questions are never answered

Strategy

Help members seek knowledge on demand and leverage the LinkedIn community for their professional goals

Easily find existing knowledge enhanced by AI

Leverage LinkedIn’s knowledge and the world’s knowledge to answer almost any work question a seeker might have

Leverage LLM powered knowledge

Enable seekers to find and discover knowledge via a conversational interface (LIA) for more natural back-and-forth interactions and follow ups to have a productive active knowledge seeking.

Learn from experts on LinkedIn

Provide a safe space for seekers to ask questions and motivate experts to share knowledge and give back to the community.

DESIGN SOLUTION

Design solution

Seek knowledge whenever you need it

Search with broad intent, uncover deeper perspectives through AI, and tap into the best of LinkedIn’s unique data.

Design solution

Discover deeper knowledge in context

Discover deeper knowledge about interesting topics you come across and get deeper insights from LinkedIn experts.

Design solution

Get experts to pitch in their knowledge

Enable experts to contribute by surfacing topics seekers care about — creating opportunities for experts to add valuable perspectives.

Anatomy of chat interface

Get answers to work problems broken down in digestible format

Connect members to the LinkedIn community

Turn an ask into a community question

LinkedIn Ask chat interface anatomy

Cite the LinkedIn source of knowledge

Give a link to the citation

Followup with suggested asks

Results

  • We got leadership alignment to pursue this project further
  • The project was split into multiple MVPs driven by specific teams in charge of that area
  • Few MVPs were launched a 1-2 years later
  • Many MVPs didn’t produce the right quality result or consumed more LLM tokens than expected and had to be shutdown because of cost benefit analysis.