LinkedIn’s Sneaky UX Trick

Occasionally at the moment when you click a LinkedIn notification on your phone, the LinkedIn app opens and – before you’re taken to the notification – you’re presented with this screen:

That looks fairly mundane at first glance. Often apps present you with information before taking you to wherever you were going. But… if you click ‘Continue’ there, you’re actually saying “I agree to LinkedIn importing my phone address book, and storing all of those personally identifiable details within their database”.

I think that’s a bit sneaky for 3 reasons:

  1. At first glance it’s not obvious that clicking ‘continue’ will do something as big as import your address book (!)
  2. This appears when you click on a notification from your phone (eg. someone new connecting to you). In that context, ‘Continue’ feels like it means ‘Continue on to where we were taking you’; not ‘Continue importing the details of all of my friends/family/colleagues’.
  3. There is no ‘skip this’ option at all. Your 2 choices are ‘Continue’ (presented in high-contrast) or ‘Learn More’ (presented in grey-on-grey text).

I think: it feels like this has been done with the intent of getting people to click ‘Continue’ without realising what they’re doing, or because it appears to be their only real choice.

What do you think?