After completing several successful projects for LinkedIn, we were hired to re-imagine one of the most critical parts of the user experience: The Connections page. This page displays your list of connections on LinkedIn and is used by tens of millions of people every day.

The goal of the redesign was to add a way for users to organize and access their connections with a new “tagging” interface. This new feature had to live within a larger set of interactions, such as finding connections by company, location, industry and searching.

Working closely with the product and dev teams, we began by doing a competitive review of existing address book applications. After understanding some of the best practices among them, we created a set of goals for the new interface. It had to provide a “familiar” experience to the leading address books, but also play up the unique strengths of LinkedIn’s innovative product.

Next, we generated several several working prototypes that could be put in front of LinkedIn users. The best concept was then refined, visually styled according to LinkedIn’s nascent style guide, and launched to a small control group of users. User reaction was very positive and some subsequent improvements were made based on feedback from the control group. We’re especially proud of the simple, efficient UI that resulted from this project.