Company Pages (beta) launched for Premium Members in Germany, Austria and Switzerland

From 20,000 to a half million: Today the number of members who have access to our new Company Pages will increase by a factor of 25, ringing in the release of one of our major product innovations this spring. You may be wondering, what led to this new category in the header bar?

As has often been the case in the past, it started with our members. Repeatedly they pointed out that although companies appear in many spots on XING, they do not have profiles of their own. Several months ago, a few of my coworkers in product development and I were asked to do an initial analysis on the topic of “Companies on XING”.

Before I get started with the story of how Company Pages came to be, however, let me introduce myself: My name is Petra Schwenk, and I’m a Product Manager at XING, currently responsible for Company Pages. I’ve been here at XING since July 2008, and was already involved in supporting the Product Management team in reworking the “Events” section.

Before starting at XING, I studied information technology. When I finished, I started my career at Hubert Burda Media, working in a number of different areas, from software development to brand strategy and project management. In most cases, I worked in the online segment. In the years before coming to XING, I worked as a consultant for SAP. In everything I’ve done, the user and the user experience has been at the center of software development.

First analyses and stages

That’s where we started, with the user at the center of the experience, when we began planning the new “Company Pages”. We did initial workshops last October with groups of users, and tested usability with a prototype feature.

Based on the results we received, we developed what are known in product design as personas, formulated use cases (”What does persona A hope to achieve when using a Company Page?”), and started the project in accordance with Scrum procedures.

Working with our Spanish and German programmers, we started developing the Company Pages in mid-November. The team thought a lot about what kind of information would be interesting to members, and worked hard on perfecting the algorithms.

For the first Company Pages release, we consciously decided to employ a transparent programming approach:
Information for all companies are gathered from member profiles, and then data quality and number of employees for each companies are checked automatically. A Company Page is then created for all companies with at least a set number of employees on XING.

You can see that XING members can influence the number of Company Pages on the website by the information they include in their personal profiles. Every 24 hours, profiles are updated and new pages are created from information in member profiles.

Layer by layer

While we were building the Company Pages, we kept in mind the image of a layered cake. Rather than bake all the layers at once, we decided to finish one perfect layer and show it to our users. Just a single layer, but with everything that a good cake should have. And then, while we’re preparing the next layers, we wanted to first get feedback from our members.

So other colleagues set to work on finding out the best way to gather ideas and suggestions from our members, and integrate them in our development process. Since the launch last week, approximately 20,000 members of the XING Research Panel have access to Company Pages. We’ve already gotten a lot of great suggestions, and found out that XING members like helping design the new product.

Starting today, all Premium Members in Germany, Austria and Switzerland will have access to the automatically generated Company Pages. We’re excited to find out what you think, and to hear your ideas for the next layer in our “Company Pages” cake. We’ve teamed up with UserVoice so that your voice is heard, and we know exactly what you like best (and what you might like to have differently).

The suggestions from our Research Panel are already being vetted and organized, and the ideas you’ve given us will be integrated into the next release. So to everyone on the Research Panel who helped us get this far: Thank you for the feedback, and we’re looking forward to even more!