Design isn’t everything, despite what some would have you believe, but it’s certainly important. One of the biggest complaints that people have with LinkedIn is that the website’s design is pretty weak, and though he was defensive at first, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman eventually agreed that the design could definitely use some improvement.
Speaking at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference last week in Aspen, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman was slow to agree with the notion that his site’s design was ‘unresponsive and confusing’ — but eventually conceded that it indeed needed work. Hoffman responded to a question from Jourdan Urbach — CTO of social video platform Ocho — about LinkedIn’s design. Urbach asked whether there was a tactical decision to make LinkedIn’s interface difficult to use. Hoffman disagreed with Urbach’s idea at the start, but rallied round and said: “Look, we work on it, we may work on it slower than we should. I think some people find it very confusing. That’s absolutely the case and there’s definitely more work we can do. There’s also people who work on it every day and actually, in fact, know how to do it. And we have a lot of complicated functionalities. So it’s not just uploading a picture hitting a “like.””
