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05

Case Study · BetterPlace · 2021

Redefining how blue-collar workforce lifecycle gets managed.

Role
Product Designer
Scope
Full platform — managed to self-service SaaS
Impact
20 min → 3 min onboarding
Teams
Hire · Onboard · Verify · Attend
20→3
Minutes — onboarding time, before and after
4
Product teams unified under one design system
400M
Blue-collar workers in India — the potential user base
0
Digital literacy assumed. Designed from first principles.
Context

A platform built for managed service — trying to become self-service.

In 2019, BetterPlace made it easy for employers to onboard and verify blue-collar employees. Magical. By 2020, as the product evolved and the user base diversified, what was simple became cumbersome. The platform had scaled. The UX hadn't.

I was responsible for understanding the target audience, running design sprints, discovering problems, and finding the best solutions possible — for users who had never used a smartphone before entering the workforce.

Goals

→Design for speed — reduce every task completion time
→Reduce frictions the product wasn't even aware of
→Understand actual users — not the assumed version
Research context map showing Personal, Temporal, Business, Social, Environmental and Technological dimensions of user context

Context research map — understanding users across 6 dimensions before designing anything

Research findings

Users were tricking the system to get things done.

The initial research findings were surprising. Customers had found workarounds — unofficial routes through the system — to perform basic tasks the way they actually needed to work. They weren't using the product as designed.

01

Most required actions weren't discoverable

Core daily tasks were buried. Users had developed muscle memory for workarounds, not the actual product.

02

Blue-collar workforce uncertainty broke the system

Workers join, leave, and transfer constantly. The system wasn't built for this rate of change.

03

No feedback states — users couldn't tell if anything worked

Processing, submission, verification — all silent. Users couldn't tell if clicking "Submit" had done anything.

04

Document management was chaos

No clear model for which documents belonged to which worker, what was submitted, what was pending.

"Customers were finding tough routes to trick the system to perform the way they actually wanted. We received feedbacks we didn't know to ask for."

Mobile wireframe flows showing dashboard, employee list, and profile screens in progression

Mobile wireframe explorations — iterating on information architecture before committing to visual design

Key decisions

From managed service to self-service — without losing anyone.

Architecture

Progressive disclosure — show only what's relevant

The old system showed everything to everyone. The new architecture surfaced only what's relevant to the user's role, stage, and current task. The most required actions came first. Everything else was one level down.

Zero literacy design

Iconography first, labels second, copy last

English text labels are meaningless to a first-time smartphone user. Every action was designed icon-first — consistent visual language across the entire platform. If a user couldn't complete a task by recognising shapes alone, the design wasn't done.

System feedback

Every state needs a visible signal

Processing, loading, success, error, empty — each had a distinct treatment. Every interaction now had an honest, immediate response. No more silent operations.

Design system

Built the component library from scratch across 4 teams

No shared system existed. Every team was building their own components. I built a unified system — typography, colour, iconography, components — adopted by Hire, Onboard, Verify, and Attend simultaneously.

BetterPlace final UI — My Employees dashboard showing employee list with status, location, and onboarding state

Final shipped UI — My Employees dashboard. Designed for speed: status at a glance, key actions surfaced, no buried navigation.

Outcome

20 minutes to 3 minutes.

↓
Onboarding: 20 min → 3 minHiring managers went from a 20-minute onboarding and verification flow to a 3-minute process. Same tasks, massively fewer steps.
✓
Managed service → self-service SaaSBetterPlace's highest-value clients transitioned successfully without requiring account management hand-holding.
→
Design system adopted across 4 teamsThe component library became the single source of truth — ending per-team UI fragmentation across the entire platform.
What I learned

What designing for real constraint teaches you.

1
Workarounds are the most honest research signal.Every unofficial path through a system is a feature request in disguise. The workaround tells you exactly where your design failed.
2
Zero digital literacy is the highest design bar.Designing for someone who has never used a smartphone forces you to strip every assumption. It makes design more honest, not harder.
3
A design system is a product, not a side project.Building shared infrastructure before visual design begins is the highest-leverage investment in a multi-team environment.