In-Product Help: helping LinkedIn members find answers

A new self-serve help experience for the LinkedIn ecosystem

3 million LinkedIn users sought help every week, and most preferred to resolve issues on their own — but the existing self-serve experience was painful, frustrating users away from the product and sending self-serve-shaped cases to internal Support Reps (30% of free-member tickets, 50% of paying-customer tickets).

I joined the newly-formed LinkedIn Help & Support team in 2019 to overhaul the help experience and design platform solutions for the entire LinkedIn ecosystem.

Help that meets users where they are

Foundational research surfaced one clear principle: guidance must happen in product. Users wanted to keep interacting with the screen they were on — to multi-task, and to avoid the friction of being pulled out of their workflow. From there, we mapped an ideal help journey across three stages:

• Access: guidance must be discoverable in product, with both a global entry point in the nav and contextual entry points throughout.
• Learn: users must stay in control. Help content lives in a single pane that lets them keep interacting with the primary screen.
• Exit: users can exit easily and pick up where they left off, with suggestions for related topics to continue learning.

Lower support volume, higher self-serve engagement

IPH launched on 7 LinkedIn products and continues to roll out across the ecosystem. After launch, we saw measurable wins on both sides — fewer support cases coming in, and significantly more users finding answers on their own.