Gmail Team recently made their product display an "Accept invitation" button on LinkedIn emails. Sadly, they designed these buttons to appear on hover. When the user tries to click on an email, they may unintentionally click on the "Accept invitation" button that appears and instant before their click. This accepts the invitation.
It just happened to me:
When the user of software performs an action that they do not desire, we call this a user error. Well-designed software prevents users from making errors.
Gmail Team should remove this feature immediately. And in the future, they should take more care with the UX design of their software.
Gmail Team is unlikely to do that. Gmail is a very good and reliable product and Gmail Team can add many poorly-designed features like this, each one making the product slightly worse, without the company seeing a measurable loss of users. There are few people at Google who hold teams accountable for making their products meet user needs. Many teams make changes and claim positive impact in their personal performance reviews, disregarding whether the changes actually make the products better or worse.
And now I unintentionally accept LinkedIn requests from strangers. 🙁
Michael