LinkedIn's prompt to personalize

Not only is LinkedIn a place to show off your credentials, source talent or be headhunted, it is also a place to find valuable content from the industry in which you operate.

But like the rest of the internet, LinkedIn is another victim of content noise. Without any context to curate your content, you could be exposed to everything from AI news to the latest developments in the cheese industry. This does not make for the best of experiences. 

But knowing that business professionals are busy, LinkedIn understands it must deliver relevant content for its feed to be useful. To make this happen, it prompts the user to help with their personalization with a single question.

Why this is really good UX:

• LinkedIn understands it only has a small window of opportunity to get the details it needs from the user. To keep it quick and easy, LinkedIn anticipates the user's answers and presents them as key topics for easy selection.
• People look to one another as a cognitive shortcut to figure out how to act, otherwise known as “herd mentality.” LinkedIn capitalizes on this with the way it categorizes the answers. The headings read “Popular with people in the x industry” to help users find their tribe and get guidance on the best topics for their circumstances.
• LinkedIn caters to both the novice and expert users by keeping the answering method simple, but by also permitting expert users to get more complex by searching for specific hashtags that speak to their interests. Balancing simple and more advanced functionality in this way helps the UX meet the demands of a wider audience.