The word’s top professional social site, LinkedIn, launched its Groups Statistics dashboard a couple of months ago.  The network is keen to make it evident why and how it has brought about some of the design decisions, in giving a final shape to the concept, with the aim of helping the users know more about the Groups project.

While group administrators can greatly gain from this same set of information, LinkedIn hasn’t designed it solely for them. And this is one of the main reasons why its Group Stats dashboards aren’t more densely stuffed with data this time around. In fact, it is trying to show users the most vital parts of the larger picture, so to say, rather than simply overwhelming them with details and confusing them with unnecessary details. Explaining the genesis and thinking behind designing of LinkedIn’s features, a recent post on the topic by LinkedIn’s a data visualization designer Anita Lillie, states:

“We have enormous potential with data, and can provide millions of members with unique insights to advance their careers. With Groups we saw a huge opportunity to make a tool our members could use to find the right groups for their professional development.”

Locating the right data sets to highlight

One of the trickiest and the most crucial steps is choosing the right data to surface. Keeping this in mind, LinkedIn wants to show one that offers insights in specific case and even in the most generic one. More importantly, its emphasis was on showing data users really care about. While joining a group, the key elements that they care about are:

1.    Group growth

2.    Demographics

3.    Activity

Focused on these areas, LinkedIn carefully opted to highlight key data around them. At the same time, it had to choose as not to display data about some other items, including more in-depth trends in job posts volume, member age, or schools members attended. Though these data fields are interesting, they are not always pertinent to the site’s target audience and use case for some reasons.

Relevance of data fields

In a way, it assigned a designated priority to each of the data type included. This in turn, helped decide the layout.  Some of the very important clusters of data deserved a chart (For example, number of comments over a period of time that is substantial and sustained in a healthy group) whereas others like number of jobs posted, say last week or so, simply merited a number. The designers placed within each tab data points that users probably are most eager to check right at the top of the page.

To sum it up, core idea behind the design is to keep the tools as simple as possible.  So, the Group Statistics also tries to show only the data that is wholly necessary in an effort to de-clutter the page and let the primary data fields really shine.