Our good friends over at LinkedIn have re-designed their website! Over the last couple of years, what started out as an experiment in social connectivity became the world’s leading business-oriented professional networking site. Although LinkedIn has always had a clean, uncluttered design that speaks for itself, it was probably about time for a little ‘Web 2′ face lift – and the new design definitely delivers.

So what has LinkedIn changed?

Top-level navigation:

The changes, as can be seen are quite substantial. Old-school tabs (which were nonetheless very usable), have been replaced with a ‘a la Facebook‘ style drop-down menu, which allows click-through for the parent pages. For example, clicking on ‘People’ above will take you to the ‘People’ main sub-page, while clicking on the arrow besides ‘People’ will allow you to jump to other subsequent pages belonging to the ‘People’ top-level menu. The navigation menu also follows through, throughout the site – something which is very important in information architecture and usability; and combined with the search bar in the same horizontal space, makes for a very-usable menu structure.

I think the top-level navigation is quite a big cleaner – with a lot more leaning towards a lot more whitespace – giving the website an open, dynamic feel.

Side-navigation & Widgets

The cool side of the new LinkedIn design includes changes to the way the user can interact with the website, and vice versa. The side navigation, which is clear, intuitive and flows throughout the website is dynamic – and more importantly allows the user to customise what menu options, i.e. ‘Groups’ or ‘Inbox’ they would like to me minimised or maximised, as they traverse the website. An example follows:

Finally, some cool social networking features. Firstly, as can be seen above, there is a new ‘What are you working on?’ feature. Relative to Facebook‘s status message(s), this handy little feature will broadcast your ‘status’ to yourconnections as a network update and will – as expected, appear as a new element on the profile page. Following in Facebook’s footsteps, LinkedIn let’s you control your status’ visibility and whether you want to see other peoples’ status in your network updates feed. And example follows:

Another new addition to the ranks on LinkedIn’s re-design are cool widgets (which LinkedIn will apparently be releasing more of!) that sit in the right-hand sidebar. They can be dragged-and-dropped into position and feature such information such as: Your profile snapshot (views, how many times you have appeared in search results, etc), as well as Q&A from the network, and finally jobs, and other links. Clicking on ‘edit’ as seen below, gives the user options that can be changed for that particular ‘widget’. For example, clicking ‘edit’ on the “Answers” widget, let’s you select what search answers category you would like – from a drop-down.

Let’s take a look at some other visual/functional comparisons.

The old LinkedIn contacts page:

The new LinkedIn contacts page:

The old LinkedIn (logged in) homepage:

The new LinkedIn (logged in) homepage:

So there you have it! The new LinkedIn homepage and review of a brand spankin’ new feature-set. Overall, I think the site is very usable, and more importantly, user-friendly. However, nothing is ever going to be 100% – and there are little quirks.

When JavaScript is disabled, as imagined, not many features are still usable. For example, the widgets are now gone, and you can’t even minimise/maximise your left-hand navigation! I mean hat’s off to LinkedIn for a great re-design, but I’m sure it would not have been hard to make a degradable-version of the website for when JavaScript is disabled or turned off (for whatever reason!). However, to LinkedIn’s defense, many important functions such as ‘Contacts’ page do have a ‘basic connection browser’ that whilst looking archaic, got the job done; which I thought was admirable!

There were also a few things that LinkedIn could work on to add that extra bit of professionalism to the site, and they include little things like making sure there aren’t too many different styles representing many of the same things; such as font/typeface choices on the interface – which seemed like ‘a bit of everything’. Adding onto that were very-minor things such as inconsistencies with buttons. Once again, all these things are very minor – and sometimes a consistent user experience comes second to the visual weighting and importance that colour and style bring to navigational/interface items.

A great design, from a great website!

So what do you think? Please leave any comments you may have – hate it? love it? Let the community know – and be sure to sign up to the RSS feed for more updates on when we post a new article.

Founded in 2004, the ‘social utility’ affectionately known to just about everyone you know as Facebook, run from Palo Alto in the United States was valued at no less than $US15 billion ($AUD 16.36 billion), and whilst only trading for a relatively short-lived four years employs 300 staff. One would think Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft would be over the moon today. His bid to win a stake in other successful Web 2.0 endeavours such as Internet ad service DoubleClick Inc. and YouTube were battles lost to Google Inc. By sealing the deal, Microsoft could finally say they have a stake in Web 2.0; because if the past is anything to go by, previous Web 2.0 endeavours by the Redmond-based company such as Spaces and the Zune Marketplace have experienced fairly insignificant take-off speeds.

Its not rocket science to see that Microsoft has a lot to win with the Facebook deal. According to Wikipedia, during its fiscal year ending in June, Microsoft’s online ad revenue rose just 21 percent to $1.84 billion compared to Google’s ad revenue soaring 64 percent to $13.3 billion – Clearly meaning owning a stake in Facebook is a big deal for ‘William’ and his mates.

If nothing else, at least finally the big fish have realised the importance that Web 2.0 plays in today’s information-packed world. Will this lead to Google giving up on their own social network – Orkut? I guess it’ll all be revealed sooner rather than later.

How much do you think this will change what we know and love about Facebook?Was it worthwhile for Facebook as much as it obviously was for Microsoft? Let us know your views.