LinkedIn.com redesign communicates less with more

I like to browse LinkedIn.com from time to time to see what people are up to, the state of the hiring market etc. I have always liked their design, and the occasional tweaks are usually good. Their latest attempt to redesign the recommendations UI, however, is confusing and less effective in two ways:

1. When reading someone's profile, the recommendations are not clearly distinct from the user generated profile. I didn't notice them when I skimmed someone's profile. I also think that placing them at the bottom (rather than inline) reduces the impact that they make.

2. in the headline box of someone's profile, I see: "profile", which means the profile telling me about the person; "connections" which means the connections that that person has (again - information about the person); and "recommendations" which I assumed meant recommendations for that person (ie. more information about that person). Instead it is recommendations that that person has made about others - which reverses the meaning of the other two tabs. Not only that, but when I did click it, the design doesn't make it clear that it is the other until I am part way into reading it.

Recommendations are one reason why linkedin profiles are more trustworthy than individual websites - linkedin.com should be careful not to lose that differentiator.

The new design is subtle and clean, and more information is available, but it actually makes the information less self evident. In HCI terms, the design lacks what is known as affordance where the function of an object (in this case a link) is intuitively known by it's characteristics. In the case of (1) it's the visual characteristics (traditional affordance). In the case of (2) it's what I would call the "affordance of proximity" (which may or may not be a phrase already in use - I'm sure it is).

In my notes for this blog I jotted down "quote Edward Tufte, but I can't find anything appropriate, and I've gone a bit off Jakob Nielsen lately.