This is a bit of a ranty post but it’s incredible how poor the LinkedIn messaging experience is. If anyone sends me a LinkedIn message I get an email telling me that so-and-so sent me a message. To read the actual message I need to clickthrough to get to the LinkedIn site. I get it, they want to increase engagement and have me access the site and show me something new. It’s just a ridiculously poor user experience. They could easily include the message text and then I can decide whether it’s something I need to respond to and when. Instead I get a useless notification telling me that I have a new message. It’s as if the LinkedIn message experience was modeled after AOL’s “you’ve got mail.”

What’s amazing is that LinkedIn knows this is a terrible experience and doesn’t actually adopt it for the paid accounts. If a recruiter sends me a message I see it in the LinkedIn notification email. Similarly, I have a recruiter account and see responses to my messages in the notification email. I understand the need to differentiate the free vs paid accounts but doing it through message notifications seems incredibly petty. Instead of hobbling the experience for the standard account why not make the premium accounts that much better?

The standard email notification doesn't include the actual message.

The recruiter version contains the message.