.Workss
Helping people find professionals they can trust, and helping professionals get found.
Who does a five star rating actually help?
Workss is a marketplace with two sides: people who need skilled professionals, and professionals who want to be found. I designed the whole experience, from the first research conversation to the final screens. That meant understanding the problem, shaping how the app is organized, designing how people interact with it, and building the visual system, all around the hardest problem any marketplace faces: getting people who have never met to trust each other.
Industry
:
Professional networking & services
Timeline
:
5 months
Role
:
Product Designer, Freelancing
01 · The Challenge
Pet parents know their pets need activity. Staying consistent is the hard part.
Priya needs an electrician this week and has no reliable way to judge who she can trust. Ajay is a good electrician, but still gets most of his work through word of mouth. Workss had to solve both problems in the same product, at the same time.
Priya Sharma
28 years
School Teacher
Benagluru
Needs reliable professionals for home services and wants clear, detailed profiles she can compare easily, ideally in her own language.
Struggles to find detailed, trustworthy profiles
Language barriers slow down decisions
Few good ways to compare cost and availability
Ajay Singh
35 years
Electrician
Benagluru
Ten years of experience and a strong local reputation, but relies almost entirely on referrals to find new clients.
Hard to find platforms with steady, relevant work
No simple way to communicate availability and pricing
Regional language gaps complicate client conversations
02 · Why It Mattered
The cost of getting it wrong
For seekers, the cost was wasted time and real risk. They compared options with almost no reliable information, and sometimes hired someone unqualified because there was no better way to check. For professionals, the cost was lost income. People who were genuinely good at their trade could lose work to whoever had the bigger network, not whoever did the better job.
03 · My Role & Scope
What I actually owned
I was the Product Designer on this project from start to finish, over four months. I framed the research questions, ran the interviews, and turned what I learned into a small set of clear insights. From there, I shaped the product's structure: how discovery works, how trust gets shown, and how people communicate. I carried that thinking through the interaction design, the visual system, and early usability checks on the prototype.
Workss hasn't launched yet, so where I didn't have enough proof, I wrote the decision down as a hypothesis to test once real usage data comes in, rather than treating it as a settled fact.
04 · Understanding the Problem
The cost of getting it wrong
I interviewed two people who were actively looking for professionals, and two professionals who were actively looking for work, in person. That is a small sample. It was enough to point me toward useful themes, but not enough to call the results certain. I treated every finding as something to design around and test further, not as proven fact.
Affinity mapping, from raw notes to themes
After each interview, I pulled out individual observations and grouped them on a board. Notes that repeated across both seekers and professionals, not just within one conversation, were the ones I trusted enough to turn into a theme.
Wanted to see finished work first
Seeker interview
Hesitant to message someone from a profile alone
Seeker interview
A star rating on its own felt risky to trust
Seeker interview
01
People won't reach out without proof
Seekers hesitated to contact a professional based on a profile alone. They wanted to see finished work first, not just a star rating.
Most new clients come through word of mouth
Professional interview
Doesn't fully trust listings or directory apps
Seeker interview
02
Referrals are the default because alternatives don't earn enough trust
Both sides fell back on word of mouth, not simply out of habit, but because the available alternatives did not create enough confidence.
Cares more about seeing completed work than a score
Seeker interview
Feels ratings can be generic or easy to game
Seeker interview
03
Portfolios beat ratings
Given the choice, people placed more value on actual completed work than review scores, which could feel generic or easy to game.
Gets pushed to a phone call too early in the conversation
Seeker interview
Hard to keep track of client conversations across apps
Professional interview
04
Communication needs to live in one place
Being pushed into a phone call or a different app broke the experience and made conversations harder to track.
Not worried about reputation once already hired
Professional interview
Main worry is being found by clients at all
Professional interview
05
Getting discovered is the real problem for professionals
Professionals were less worried about their reputation once hired, and far more worried about being found in the first place.
The research was also used to map where uncertainty remained. A larger interview round and lightweight competitive review would be the next step before treating these themes as market-wide truths.
05 · Defining the Opportunity
The design question
How might we help someone confidently choose the right professional, while giving professionals a fair way to show what they can actually do?
This framing ruled out the easy but wrong answer, which was simply building a better search engine for listings. The insights pointed somewhere more specific. I needed to build the experience around evidence of work, not just information about people.
06 · Exploring Solutions
Directions considered
Three directions were explored before settling on the final structure.
Discovery built around a map
This works well for location based services, but it made comparing professionals harder when the real decision came down to skill, proof of work, and availability. Location still mattered, so I kept it as a filter instead of the main way to search.
Profiles built around ratings
This is familiar and fast to scan, but it is weak for a brand new platform. New professionals would start out with almost no visible trust. In the end, I moved ratings into a supporting role instead of the main signal.
AI matching
This could be useful later, but it needs more data about people's preferences and past service history than the product had at the start. A simpler, structured way to search was easier to build, understand, and test first.
07 · User Flow
Mapping every screen and decision point
Once the direction was set, I mapped the full flow end to end: onboarding and login, posting and finding work, professional profiles, Clips, chat and friends, groups, and account settings, including every branch where something could go right or wrong.
08 · Key Design Decisions
Insight → Decision → Cost
The five decisions that turned research into the actual product, and what each one cost.
People won't reach out without proof
Insight
People wanted proof of work before making contact, and trusted portfolios more than ratings.
Decision
Lead each profile with a visual gallery of completed work and clear skill tags. Keep star ratings as supporting evidence, not the headline.
Cost
New professionals with little work history still need to put in effort to show evidence before they see any payoff.
Communication kept inside the product
Insight
Being pushed to calls or other apps broke the experience and scattered conversations.
Decision
Create a native conversation space so contact can start and continue in one place.
Cost
I kept an "open to calls" option rather than forcing chat, which means supporting two paths instead of one.
Structured discovery over open search
Insight
Finding the right professional took effort across platforms, referrals, and comparisons.
Decision
Filter by profession, city, and other key fields, with cards that surface skills and recent work immediately.
Cost
Professionals with a niche or mixed skill set can be harder to surface through fixed categories.
Regional language and accessibility as core
Insight
Many professionals are more comfortable in a regional language than English. This is a real barrier, not a nice to have.
Decision
Start with language selection, and support the rest of the app with clear icons, a readable layout, larger touch targets, and patterns that work well with screen readers.
Cost
Every screen has to hold up once it is translated, which limits how long the layout and copy can be.
Showing proof of work early, through Clips
Insight
Professionals without an established review history still needed a believable way to show their skill.
Decision
Let professionals post short videos of real work as it happens, similar to an Instagram story. Each Clip stays live for 24 hours from upload, so it is a way to show current, active work, not a permanent gallery. The permanent portfolio on a professional's profile is a separate, lasting feature.
Cost
Because Clips disappear after 24 hours, professionals need to post regularly for this to work as an ongoing trust signal, and it cannot replace the portfolio as the lasting proof of work.
09 · Challenges and Costs
What made this genuinely hard
Cold start
A marketplace only works if both sides show up together. Every trust feature had to work even with very little platform history behind it.
Small sample
Four interviews gave direction, not certainty. Insights were treated as hypotheses to validate further, not settled facts.
Uneven digital fluency
Professionals range widely in comfort with apps. That pushed the interface toward simpler navigation over density or cleverness.
Scope discipline
The product could have expanded into booking, payments, scheduling, verification, and service guarantees. I kept the core scope focused on discovery, evaluation, and connection so the trust problem could be solved clearly first.
10 · The Final Solution
Three journeys, not a list of screens
The product comes together around three journeys, getting started, finding and evaluating, and connecting and following up. The recordings below are pulled straight from the working prototype, not mockups.
01
Getting started
Choose a language, get a short introduction, verify a mobile number, pick seeker or professional, and complete a profile. Each step removes a specific friction instead of following a standard onboarding pattern for its own sake.
Onboarding
Language selection, a short intro, mobile verification, choosing seeker or professional, and profile setup.
02
Finding & evaluating
The Works and Professionals sections let people filter by what matters most, like profession and city, while the cards lead with proof of work so people don't need another click to judge quality.
Home/Works
Professionals
Post Work
Home / Works
The main feed, with search by profession type and work cards leading with location, skills, and languages.
03
Connecting & following up
The conversation space keeps the relationship in one place once contact is made, with an optional fallback to a call when that genuinely works better.
Clips
Chat & Friends
My Account
Chat & Friends
Conversations, friend requests, and groups, all kept in one place instead of scattered across apps.
11 · Impact & Results
Held to the same honesty as the research
Six goals were defined at the start: professionals discovered through search, profile and portfolio engagement, connection rate, messages initiated, time to find a professional, and user trust and satisfaction.
Workss hasn't launched yet, so there is no real product analytics to report, and no invented numbers are shown here as results. Testing so far has focused on whether people understood the value of proof of work, could compare professionals more confidently, and could move from discovery to contact without unnecessary friction.
What the prototype direction suggested
Proof of work gave users a stronger starting point for comparison than a profile built around ratings alone.
Structured filters made searching feel less open ended.
Keeping communication in the same product made the next step after discovery easier to understand.
These are directional design outcomes, not statistically significant product metrics.
What I would measure next
Professionals discovered
How often relevant professionals are surfaced and opened from search or category discovery.
Connection rate
How often a profile view leads to a meaningful next action such as chat, call, or request.
Time to find a professional
How quickly a seeker can move from an initial need to a shortlist they feel confident about.
The key lesson is this. Once Workss goes live, the next design decisions should come from real behaviour, not from how convincing the interface looks in a prototype.
12 · Key Takeaways
What made this genuinely hard
Solved a trust problem on both sides
Both sides needed confidence before the marketplace could work. It was never just about a better interface.
Prioritized evidence over claims
Portfolios and clear signals of skill mattered more than making ratings people give themselves the centre of the experience.
Treated language and accessibility as core
These decisions shaped the product structure early, not added after the main flow was already designed.
Designed for a platform with no history yet
New professionals needed a way to show value before they had built up reviews or a track record.
Kept research honest about its limits
The interviews gave direction, not certainty, and this case study says so clearly.
13 · Reflection
What I'd do differently
The biggest thing I would change is the size of the research. Four interviews pointed toward real themes, but they weren't enough for me to confidently prioritize between them. A larger round of interviews, or even a simple survey, would have tested whether leading with portfolios really works across more trades before I locked the structure in.
I would also close the loop on impact earlier. Success metrics were defined up front but never checked against real use, which made it hard to know which decisions actually worked. Even a simple, regular habit of testing would have made later decisions rest on more evidence.
As Workss moves toward launch, I want to test the early experience, when the platform still has little history, across more professional categories. I also want to check how language preferences change the onboarding and discovery flow, and study where trust breaks down between seeing a profile and making contact.