LinkedIn’s mobile app gets a redesign aimed at making connections more obvious

LinkedIn has tweaked the design for its mobile app, giving user profiles a major makeover. The new profiles aim to provide a lot more context around how people connect and make it easier for people to talk to each other, even when they don’t share connections.

The new design, called “Blue Steel” internally, is meant to provide you with information about a person such as where they work, where they went to university and what interests they have.

According to the professional social network, the new profiles are designed to help you “tell your story to other professionals when they’re looking for you on the go’. If there are parts missing, it says, it’ll let you know and ask you to fill those pieces in.

If you’re wondering about the project name, yes it is a reference to the movie Zoolander, and according to LinkedIn it’s because it “wanted to make you, our members, look really really ridiculously good looking”.

The new app also allows you to get a more insights around who’s been viewing your profile, where they’ve been viewing it from and a section pointing out what you have in common.

The fact that LinkedIn’s decided to roll out the new profiles on mobile first, is pretty significant, especially given how long it took it to roll out a mobile strategy in the first place.

As Readwrite points out however, LinkedIn’s been on something of a mobile streak of late, following a similar strategy to Facebook and releasing a number of apps aimed at pulling specific parts of its all around service into separate apps.

It’s also important that it hasn’t forgotten about its blue riband app amidst this disintegration and is continuing to improve it, both in terms of features and user experience.