LinkedIn has updated its iPhone and Android applications, adding a cleaner, friendly interface, simplifying the process of finding the people you most want to connect with.

The company told Pocket-lint that over 27 per cent of its users engage with LinkedIn through mobile, a rise of 12 per cent year-on-year, so has focused on greatly enhancing its existing smartphone apps, even though the last versions were much lauded and awarded.

The updated app, which is launched simultaneously across devices, has an improved design, with more emphasis on pictures. And new animations have been added to seemingly small tasks, such as “liking” a post or swiping in a colleague or friend’s card. They may not be significant on their own, but add up to provide a more intuitive experience.

“For the last three months, we’ve had the entire company using the app,” explained Tomer Cohen, product lead, Mobile, LinkedIn. “We got over 10,000 pieces of feedback, and we’ve made sure that we gave high priority to those tiny little details.”

The update is not just aesthetic, however. There are practical changes too, that improve the way users can get to the information on LinkedIn as quickly and efficiently as possible.

“We focused on three main areas,” we were told by Cohen. “The first is a brand new visual design. The second is a complete makeover of the central stage, the professional stream.

“When people used the previous app, they were always one or two steps away from where they wanted to get to. So we’ve pulled that information to the main screen and made it very visible and engaging.

“The third area is personal navigation. Our mobile user base is using LinkedIn in many shapes and forms. We have news consumers. We have groups users and job seekers. And it was important for us to provide all of those experiences to our mobile users while having a very intuitive and simple navigation through the app.

“We actually built a new algorithm to study what the user is doing and have their favourites as part of the navigation,” he added.

The new navigation works on a side screen which you can swipe on and off. It has easy-to-understand pre-determined shortcuts that take you exactly where you want to go. Alternatively, you now have the ability to add new shortcuts to your menu, in order to personalise it exactly as you want. Your own information is one tap away from this bar, as are messages and other details.

The news stream also has new functionality. As well as feature a new animation with the “like” feature, it features a like and comment feature under each post in the stream. It’s much easier to engage with others than ever before.

“Our goal was to design the best personalised experience for our everyday globalised professional,” said Cohen. “As you can imagine, we are super excited to get this app to our members.”

You can download the new and improved LinkedIn application from iTunes and Google Play now.