A Research-Driven POC Redesign for Women Job Seekers
Mahindra Kaabil
Design Role
UI/UX Design Intern
Industry
Employment & Skilling
Team
4 members
Timeline
2 weeks
Client Work
Screens and research documentation from this project are shared with context of my internship contribution. Lemon Yellow LLP retains ownership of the original research.
My Role
During my internship at Lemon Yellow LLP, I collaborated with the research team through the competitive analysis, UX audit, and usability testing phases — the research was led and conducted by the team, and my role was to contribute to discussions, absorb the findings, and build context around the product and its users. Once the research wrapped up, I independently took on the POC redesign, working on 4 major screens across the candidate and recruiter portals with guidance from a senior designer.
About The Project
The Brief
Lemon Yellow LLP was engaged to conduct a thorough UX research exercise on Mahindra Kaabil — a newly launched app by the Mahindra Group — and deliver a POC redesign based on the findings. The goal was to make the platform more user-friendly, intuitive, and a valuable resource for women job seekers — addressing critical usability issues, improving information hierarchy, reducing cognitive load, and introducing missing but essential features like recruiter login, personalisation, and progressive disclosure.
I collaborated with the research team during the research phase and independently handled the POC redesign — translating key insights into improved designs across 4 major screens.
Context
Mahindra Kaabil started as an established offline program connecting women with skilling institutes and job opportunities on the ground. The app was their next step to extend their reach digitally and engage a larger audience of women job seekers.
The Problem
The Kaabil app had several usability issues that were making the experience confusing and frustrating for its core users — women job seekers, many of whom may be first-time smartphone users. Key problems identified across the research included:
The homepage displayed the user's name at all times, adding clutter without adding value
Job cards lacked important contextual information like salary, work type, and location clarity
The education detail page used a single long list format that confused users who thought they had to fill everything
The skills page lacked search, filters, and course detail — making discovery difficult
There was no dedicated recruiter login — recruiters from the same organisation were creating individual company profiles, causing duplication and confusion
The Solution
A POC redesign addressing the most critical issues across 4 screens — Homepage, Education Detail Page, Skills Page, and Recruiter's Login — with each redesign directly mapped to research findings and usability heuristics.
What We Found
The research was conducted by the Lemon Yellow team across three methods. I was part of the team during this phase, contributing to discussions and gaining context that directly informed the POC.
Competitive Analysis
Four competitors were analysed — Apna, Indeed, WorkIndia, and Naukri. The journeys studied were Profile Making, Job Search, and Apply & Track. This helped benchmark what users are already accustomed to and where Kaabil was falling behind industry standards.
UX Audit
45+ candidate portal screens and 35+ recruiter portal screens were audited against Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics. A total of 174 issues were identified — 92 in the candidate portal and 82 in the recruiter portal — categorised as minor, major, and critical.
Usability Testing
Real users were observed using the app to identify pain points from a first-hand perspective. The testing covered the same three journeys — Profile Making, Job Search, and Apply & Track — and surfaced behavioural insights that audit and competitive analysis alone couldn't reveal.
From Insights to Ideas
With research findings in hand I mapped the most critical issues to screens that were core to the user journey and had the highest impact potential — leading me to the Homepage, Education Detail Page, Skills Page, and Recruiter's Login.
Each screen went through multiple iterations with feedback from a senior designer. A few key decisions that shaped the final designs:
Education page moved from a single long list to progressive disclosure — the first version still felt overwhelming
Skills page card layout was tested multiple times to balance visual richness with clarity
Recruiter login added company search after realising a dropdown alone wouldn't scale
Before & After
Screens reflect my design contribution during my internship at Lemon Yellow LLP. Research documentation belongs to Lemon Yellow LLP.
Homepage
Here's a breakdown of the key issues identified on the Homepage and how I addressed them in the redesign:
Education Detail Page
Here's how the Education Detail Page was restructured to reduce confusion and improve completion rates:
Skills Page
Here's how the Skills Page was redesigned to make course discovery easier and more personalised:
Recruiter's Login
This screen didn't exist in the original app. Here's the flow I designed from scratch to solve the recruiter duplication problem:
Wrapping Up
Working on Mahindra Kaabil was a meaningful project for me — contributing to a brand of this scale and working alongside a dedicated research team was a genuinely different experience from anything I had done before in an industry setting. The POC was delivered with redesigns across 4 major screens, each directly mapped to research findings and usability heuristics.
What I took away from this
This project taught me what real research collaboration looks like. Coming from college projects where you do everything yourself, working alongside a dedicated research team was a completely different experience — seeing how they structure a competitive analysis, conduct a UX audit, and run usability testing with real users gave me a much deeper appreciation for how research informs design.
The biggest shift was learning how to take someone else's findings and translate them into design decisions. That handoff between research and design is a skill I hadn't practised before and this project gave me my first real taste of it.
What I'd do differently
The one thing I'd add if I could go back is usability testing on my redesigned screens — closing the loop by validating whether the changes actually improved the experience for real users. That's something I want hands-on experience with in my next project.
