MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Nathan Hammond radiates fatigue. The bearded and tousle-haired engineer has clocked an average of 60 hours a week for four months working on Voyager, the most important mobile app in LinkedIn’s history.
Though he moved to San Francisco from North Carolina earlier this year, Hammond hasn’t had time to explore his new digs. Instead, the user interface engineer has been laser-focused on a new app codenamed Voyager. It’s intended to get you, me and millions of others to use LinkedIn more often, and he hopes it will work without a hitch when it’s released to the world Tuesday.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m here, at home or on the train — I’m working,” said Hammond, sitting at a mostly empty desk, with a laptop, phone, screens and an empty bowl next to a box of Honey Nut Cheerios on a recent Wednesday here at LinkedIn’s headquarters.
It’s not an understatement to say Hammond, along the 200 other engineers and designers working on the new app, have been on a long journey with Voyager, an app named after one of the most ambitious NASA exploration probes ever sent into space. Here on Earth, the project is a dramatic revamp of LinkedIn’s mobile app, which had been often criticized for being cluttered and difficult to navigate.
The new flagship app is key to LinkedIn’s future and Hammond’s peace of mind. It’s intended to be the primary way people use the 12-year-old social network — its “front door,” as they say. More than half of LinkedIn’s traffic comes from people checking in on a mobile phone or tablet, and it’s expected to rise even further. The company believes giving people a faster, more efficient way to use its services, which help them find jobs or just connect with others, will attract new users beyond the 400 million it currently boasts. (The social network is free to use, but charges for features like advanced search and messaging strangers. LinkedIn doesn’t say how many of its users pay.)
To do this, the app has a new look, ditching a former design that only offered a search bar, an ability to write posts a la Facebook and a news feed. There are now five buttons in a row on the bottom of the home page: Home, Me, Messages, My Network and Search. Home offers up news stories and items that LinkedIn thinks are most important to people and their network, while the Me feature lets you put in more details about yourself as part of your personal branding. Messaging is intended for quick, casual banter.
Voyager represents LinkedIn’s ambition to grow beyond its roots as a resume-on-the-Web service into the center of your workday. If it’s successful, you’ll think of it as an app for enhancing your professional life the way Facebook enhances for your personal life, allowing you to share and stay in touch with friends and colleagues.
“This is more about a new LinkedIn emerging than it is about a new app,” Joff Redfern, LinkedIn’s vice president of product, said during a conversation inside a building that’s solely dedicated to building Voyager in the heart of the company’s sprawling Silicon Valley campus. (Yes, there’s also a massive cafeteria, where the food is free, and the cuisine is on par with a good, and expensive, restaurant in San Francisco.)
More than 4,000 LinkedIn employees tested Voyager before its official launch tonight. It was also bullet-tested by people in locales as close as Chicago and as far away as India, where the social network is particularly popular. (The app was rewritten to suck less data from mobile plans, a nod to the older-generation wireless connections prevalent in that part of the world.)
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said Voyager is about “one app, developed by one team, with one vision.”
“When we set about to reimagine LinkedIn’s flagship app, we started by asking ourselves a single question: ‘What would we build if we could start all over?'” Weiner said in an email statement. “The answer was an app with greater focus on fewer things done better, seamlessly integrated; simpler, more personalized, and more responsive.”
Voyager also promotes LinkedIn’s other standalone services, including its news app, called Pulse, and Lynda.com, the online-education site it purchased in April for $1.5 billion, its biggest acquisition to date.
LinkedIn feels the pressure to get it right, especially as people look to other social networks and services like Facebook to serve as their main point of contact with the rest of the world. The Voyager team was fine tuning right up to the app’s global launch to make sure the right approvals were in place to work on Apple iOS and Google Android phones and tablets.
It makes sense for LinkedIn to hit the reset button on its main app, said John Jackson, vice president for mobile and connected platforms at market research firm IDC. “Whether it is LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, this is ultimately a fight for engagement to get more eyeballs looking at and using your product for long periods of time,” he said. “They are trying to own the professional graph, rather than the social graph.”