Linkedin is even less useful to me now becuase they made a silly design choice.

After you accept an incoming connection from someone, Linkedin takes you to this page:

There are a few problematic things about this design:

1. The Add and Skip actions are too close to each other.

   Their intention is the complete opposite, so there should

   never be a question as to what the user wanted to do.

2. The Connections are pre-selected

   Adding connections is pretty much irreversible. Linkedin makes

   it almost impossible to remove a connection (and there is definitely no way to rescind an invitation to connect), so "Select All" should be an opt-in, not an opt-out function.

3. The page doesn't say where it found these people

   This is less of a faux paux, but considering

   that there are over thousand, I do want to know if I should mass invite them all because they came from my other networks, or if Linkedin is slipping some suggestions of their own in.

4. The button text is asynchronously generated

   That means that the "1254" part is being

   calculated at a different time than the rendering of the button on the page. Sometimes it happens before, sometimes it happens after. I've duplicated what happens sometimes when that number isn't loaded and placed it below for comparison.

   

   Now imagine that I wanted to "Skip this step" and while I was clicking, the 1254 finished loading. WHAT WOULD HAPPEN THEN??

   

..

Now I have a very large number of new connections, none of whom I intended to add. And more importantly, I can't actually get a list of the people that I inadvertantly added. When I click on the notifications of new connections, all I get is a list of ALL my connections, sorted alphabetically.

If Linkedin is about professional networks that are based around some semblance of trust, the design of this page does not contribute to that trust.

But all that said and done, the most perplexing part of all of this is that over 200 strangers have accepted my invitation request already. What?