Designing the MVP for a Blue-Collar Job Marketplace
Tools
Figma | FigJam | Adobe Illustrator | Miro
My role
Insight extraction | UI design | UX Design | UX Writing | Interaction design | Design strategy | Mockups and Prototyping
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Background
AamDhanE is an India-based blue-collar job matchmaking and workforce management platform that connects workers with employers across garment, manufacturing, and construction sectors. The platform aims to replace informal, middlemen-driven hiring with direct, transparent, and informed connections, giving workers access to verified opportunities and employers access to reliable talent.
I joined AamDhanE at its earliest stage to design core user flows for the mobile app MVP that later scaled to 150,000+ job listings across 100+ cities.
The Challenge
India's blue-collar workforce, comprising hundreds of millions in the unorganized sector, continues to rely heavily on traditional job search methods: newspaper classifieds, word-of-mouth referrals, and in-person networking. While these methods have served workers for decades, they're often inefficient, geographically limited, and lack transparency.
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​"How might we design a mobile-first job platform that feels intuitive, trustworthy, and accessible for blue-collar workers across India, while providing a better experience than traditional job-searching methods"
Understanding the User
Blue-collar job platforms existed, but workers still relied on middlemen, word-of-mouth, and informal referrals. Something wasn't working. Through competitive analysis and research into India's unorganized sector, I set out to understand the gap between solutions and actual user needs.
• Lack of transparency on actual wages, working conditions, or job requirements
• Unable to access opportunities in new regions
• Dependence on middle-men and contractors who take salary cuts
• No options or preferences on the type of job
• Lack of skilled and reliable workers
• Dependence on middlemen and agents to provide workers
• Workers leave without notice, disrupting production
​• No standard recruitment process
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How did I approach this
Key Insights
Through competitive analysis and research into India's unorganized sector, I discovered four fundamental challenges that shaped how I approach the design.
1
It's a three-way marketplace
WHAT I FOUND
There are three players, workers, middlemen, and factory owners., and each group has different needs.
2
Language isn't optional
WHAT I FOUND
57% of users are more comfortable with regional language and 70% struggle with English keyboard.
3
Building trust is difficult
WHAT I FOUND
90% of workers find jobs through word-of-mouth, and contractors. Most don't have formal work history.
4
Complex flows
WHAT I FOUND
With only 25% digital literacy in rural areas, complex forms and too many options at once cause people to drop off.
Design Solution
The platform serves three user groups: workers, agents, and factory owners. For the mobile app,
I focused on designing the Worker and Agent modules, the two sides that needed mobile-first experiences for on-the-go job search and worker management. The factory owner experience was handled separately on web.
Onboarding
Job Discovery
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Job Application
Aadhaar Verification
Native Language Design
Agent Module
The Agent module follows similar accessibility principles, enabling middlemen to post jobs and manage worker connections through a simplified mobile interface.
Impact and Reflections
The MVP I contributed to later scaled to 150,000+ job listings across 100+ cities, validating the need for accessible, mobile-first experiences in India's blue-collar job market.
The regional language interfaces, allowing users to navigate in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali etc. while retaining some familiar English terms, led to 40% higher user adoption compared to English-only alternatives, proving that accessibility requires cultural understanding, not just translation.
What I learned
This was my first UX/UI role, and it fundamentally shaped how I approach design.
I learned that accessibility isn't just about following WCAG guidelines. It's about understanding barriers like language, digital literacy, and trust, then designing solutions that address root causes rather than symptoms. It taught me to connect user research directly to interface decisions. I also learned to apply skills I had only used in case studies and classroom projects.
If I could go back in time, I would
Conduct direct usability testing myself, to understand more about the actual environments of blue-collar workers, their constraints, their needs, and validate assumptions about digital literacy. I would go on ground to understand my users to design for them.