UIUXfolio Projects

Indeed Redesign Case Study

Role

Product Designer

Program

Career Foundry UI Specialization

Region

USA/Canada

Year

2025

Duration

12 Weeks

Platform

Mobile • Desktop • Tablet

Prototype Link

Concept project completed as part of the CareerFoundry Product Design program. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or commissioned by Indeed. All brand names and marks belong to their respective owners.

Project Overview

The Indeed Entry‑Level Experience redesign focuses on reducing decision anxiety for early‑career job seekers by creating a dedicated, guided job‑search and application flow within the logged‑in experience.

The project addresses the cognitive overload fresh graduates face when navigating a platform designed primarily for experienced professionals.

Rather than introducing new features, this redesign prioritizes clarity, guidance, and confidence, helping users understand whether they qualify, what to do next, and how to apply without second‑guessing themselves.

Problem:

Indeed serves every career stage in a single experience, and that breadth works against entry-level job seekers. Fresh graduates face mixed seniority roles, requirements that are hard to interpret, and filters that force them to judge their own eligibility. The result is hesitation, lost confidence, and abandoned applications, even from qualified candidates.

Goal:

Design a dedicated entry-level job search and application experience that reduces decision anxiety and builds confidence. Simplify discovery, provide clear guidance at every step, and help first-time job seekers understand requirements and apply without second-guessing, all while staying aligned with Indeed's existing ecosystem and brand.

My role:

Lead Product Designer, leading the project end-to-end. I owned the experience strategy, interaction design, and visual execution across desktop, tablet, and mobile, focusing on creating a guided, confidence-building flow for entry-level users within the logged-in Indeed experience

Responsibilities:

Secondary research — community feedback analysis from Reddit and Quora

Personas and user needs — persona definition and journey mapping
User flows and information architecture — post-login journey structure
End-to-end design in Figma — paper, low-fidelity, and high-fidelity
Usability testing — unmoderated sessions and iteration across two rounds
Design system — color, typography, spacing, and iconography tokens
Accessibility — validation against WCAG 2.1 AA
Responsive prototypes — mobile-first interactive prototypes

Solution:

This redesign introduces a dedicated entry-level experience within Indeed's logged-in flow a simplified home with career-stage filtering, clearly tagged entry-level job cards, and a guided 3-step apply process (resume → details → review). The experience is intentionally scoped to reduce cognitive load while preserving Indeed's core functionality.

Three principles shaped every decision:

Clarity over clutter
Guidance over choice
Confidence over speed

User Research

During discovery, I grounded the research in two methods: secondary research using community feedback from Reddit and Quora, and a competitive analysis of how LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed serve early-career users. Across both, a clear pattern emerged , users hesitate to apply due to uncertainty about eligibility, not difficulty finding jobs. The core problem was not discoverability, but confidence.

Secondary Research

Community feedback from real entry-level job seekers, gathered from Reddit and Quora.

I analyzed community discussions where entry-level job seekers describe their job-search experience in their own words. A consistent pattern emerged: users hesitate to apply because of uncertainty about eligibility. Roles labeled "entry-level" often still demand experience, leading to wasted time and application fatigue.

"I search for entry-level roles, but most of them still expect experience. After opening so many listings, I stop applying because it feels pointless."

"The filters don't really protect my time. Jobs show as 'urgently hiring' but have been open for months, and I still have to double-check every role."

"The filters don't always work, and I keep seeing 'urgently hiring' jobs that have been up for months. It wastes time."

Competitive Analysis

How LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed handle entry-level job seekers today.

I reviewed how the three major platforms serve early-career users. Each surfaces entry-level roles, but none removes the burden of self-judging eligibility. Career-stage filters sit buried among dozens of options, "entry-level" tagging is inconsistent, and the apply flow is identical for a first-time applicant and a fifteen-year veteran. This confirmed the opportunity: not more features, but a dedicated experience that makes eligibility obvious and the first application feel safe.

Secondary Research

Community feedback from real entry-level job seekers, gathered from Reddit and Quora.

"I search for entry-level roles, but most of them still expect experience. After opening so many listings, I stop applying because it feels pointless."

"The filters don't really protect my time. Jobs show as 'urgently hiring' but have been open for months, and I still have to double-check every role."

"The filters don't always work, and I keep seeing 'urgently hiring' jobs that have been up for months. It wastes time."

Competitive Analysis

How LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed handle entry-level job seekers today.

Secondary Research

Community feedback from real entry-level job seekers, gathered from Reddit and Quora.

"I search for entry-level roles, but most of them still expect experience. After opening so many listings, I stop applying because it feels pointless."

"The filters don't really protect my time. Jobs show as 'urgently hiring' but have been open for months, and I still have to double-check every role."

"The filters don't always work, and I keep seeing 'urgently hiring' jobs that have been up for months. It wastes time."

DEFINE

With the research in hand, I turned findings into a clear point of view. I distilled the recurring signals into three pain points, grounded them in a persona, Aisha Khan, a recent graduate applying from her phone, and traced her journey from first search through submitted application. One insight anchored everything that followed: at every step, entry-level users are silently asking "Am I doing this right?" Answering that question became the definition of the product. Three principles carried it into design: clarity over clutter, guidance over choice, confidence over speed.

Pain Points

Discovery:

Entry-level and senior roles appear in the same feed, forcing job seekers to open listing after listing just to check if a role is truly entry-level. Filters offer no career-stage guidance, so users must judge their own eligibility, wasting time and building frustration before a single application is sent.

Evaluation

Job requirements read as dense walls of text with no way to quickly tell what is essential. Roles labeled "entry-level" still ask for prior experience, so users who meet the real requirements doubt their qualifications and hesitate at the exact moment they should be applying.

Application

For someone who has never applied before, the application itself feels high-risk. There is no sense of how many steps remain, what happens after submitting, or whether anything was done correctly. That uncertainty turns interest into anxiety, and anxiety into abandoned applications.

User Personas

Research signals synthesized into one representative user. Aisha Khan anchors every design decision that follows.

User Journey Map

Aisha's end-to-end journey on Indeed, from first search to submitted application. Each moment of hesitation became an improvement opportunity.

I mapped Aisha's journey across six stages, from opening Indeed to submitting an application. Her emotional arc told the story. She starts curious but uncertain, dips through hesitation and doubt while evaluating roles, and only reaches confidence after submitting. Every low point in that arc became a design target, and the improvement opportunities identified here map directly to features in the final design.

Goal

Find relevant entry-level job opportunities and complete applications in a clear, guided, and confidence-building way.

Ideate

With the problem defined, I moved from insight to structure. I started at Aisha's biggest moment of hesitation, "Should I apply or not?", and mapped a user flow that removes uncertainty at every step: post-login entry, career stage pre-selected, a guided apply path, and a review before submit. The information architecture kept choices deliberately narrow, so each screen answers one question instead of presenting ten. From there I explored layouts on paper, translated the strongest direction into digital wireframes, and ran an early round of usability testing to validate the structure before investing in visual design. The pattern across every decision was the same: fewer choices, clearer progression, less room for doubt.

User Flow

Aisha's path from login to submitted application. The flow branches for first-time and returning users, keeping steps minimal on both paths.

I built the user flow by analyzing the existing Indeed structure and identifying friction points for both new and returning users. The flow starts post-login, separates entry-level and student paths, and simplifies search and filter decisions so Aisha never has to self-judge eligibility. At the apply step it branches cleanly: first-time users upload a resume and fill their details, while returning users reuse their saved information and go straight to review. Both paths converge on a single review before submit, so no application leaves without a final check. The goal at every junction was the same: reduce hesitation, minimize steps, and carry users from discovery to submission without a dead end.

Information Architecture

The app's page organization and content hierarchy. Each screen carries one decision, so Aisha moves from discovery to application without confusion.

I structured the information architecture by mapping the full journey from login to confirmation and identifying the decision-heavy moments along it. Screens are grouped by user intent, Discover, Evaluate, Apply, Confirm, with unnecessary branching removed so progression stays predictable. New and returning user logic separates early in the apply stage, which keeps both paths short instead of forcing one path to carry every condition. Each page shows only the information that step requires. Anything that could wait was deferred, and anything that could distract was cut. The result is a structure where the next action is always obvious, which is what guidance over choice looks like at the architecture level.

Paper Wireframes

Quick pen and paper structure for every screen in Aisha's flow, from home to confirmation. Testing hierarchy and intent before any pixels.

I sketched the full journey on paper first, one frame per stage: home, entry-level job list, job details, the three apply steps, and confirmation. Working at this speed made structural problems cheap to find and fix. Each sketch answered two questions: what does Aisha need to see on this screen, and what is the one action it should drive? Elements that competed with that action were cut or demoted before ever reaching digital. The result was a validated skeleton for the flow, so the wireframing stage could focus on refinement instead of discovery

Digital Wireframes

The paper structure translated into low-fidelity Figma wireframes, covering the complete flow for both first-time and returning users.

I translated the validated paper structure into low-fidelity wireframes in Figma, covering the complete journey: home, job list, job details, resume upload, contact and education, review, and confirmation. A returning-user subflow was wireframed alongside it, where saved details carry forward and Aisha lands directly on a pre-filled review. Every screen follows the same rules: minimal visual noise, one clear next step, and progression Aisha can see. Working lo-fi kept attention on structure and hierarchy, so layout decisions were settled here and the visual design stage could concentrate purely on tone and polish.

Design

With the structure validated, I moved from wireframes to the final visual experience. I set a visual direction calm enough to lower the stakes of applying, then built a token-driven design system, color, typography, spacing, and iconography, so every screen draws from the same rules instead of one-off decisions. The first high-fidelity pass translated the wireframes into polished screens, and a round of usability feedback on those screens drove a second iteration: clearer hierarchy, less clutter, and fewer competing actions at each decision point. The refined designs became an interactive prototype simulating the complete entry-level journey, from first search to submitted application, for both first-time and returning users.

Moodboard

Reference patterns from Mobbin and Dribbble that shaped the tone: calm, card-based, and confidence-building. Studied, not copied.

For visual direction, I studied polished job platform and onboarding patterns on Mobbin and Dribbble to understand what makes an interface feel calm rather than transactional. The direction I set was deliberately quiet: strong hierarchy, generous spacing, familiar patterns, and small entry-level cues that tell Aisha she is in the right place. For color, I explored two palettes and selected Indeed Dark Blue (#002057) as the foundation, building on Indeed's brand heritage while shifting to a deeper, more confident tone. I generated the full primitive color scales with uicolors.app, then mapped them to semantic tokens for text, surfaces, borders, feedback, and icons, validating contrast ratios as I went. A restrained orange accent is reserved for the two moments that matter most, Apply now and Submit application, so the interface itself points to the primary action. Typography runs on a single Inter scale, and spacing and radius sit in token sets, keeping every screen consistent by construction rather than by discipline.

Design system

A cohesive design foundation that defines the app’s visual identity through structured color scales, accessible typography, and consistent UI components to ensure clarity, scalability, and brand alignment.

From the visual direction I built a working system, not a set of one-off screens. Primitive color ramps generated with uicolors.app feed semantic tokens that carry roles: navy for trust, orange for the primary action, neutrals for calm, with green and red reserved for feedback. A single Inter scale covers everything from page titles to captions, and spacing, padding, and radius live in variable sets for mobile and desktop. The strictest rule is the smallest one: orange appears on exactly two buttons in the product, Apply now and Submit application, so the interface itself points at the action that matters. Styling is never applied screen by screen. A screen references a role, not a hex, which keeps the design consistent, accessible, and scalable by construction.

Detailed, interactive version of the design that closely reflects the final product’s visual style, functionality, and overall user experience

High-fidelity Iteration 1

• Transformed low- and mid-fidelity wireframes into a polished mobile-first interface

Refined typography, color usage, and component consistency to align with the entry-level confidence theme.
Strengthened visual cues such as career-level tags, step indicators, and CTA prominence.
Simplified filter access and improved dropdown behavior based on usability feedback.
Designed guided, step-based apply screens to feel predictable and manageable.
Focused on thumb-friendly interactions and clean vertical flow for mobile usability.

Usability Studies

I conducted unmoderated usability testing with two participants using the initial low-fidelity wireframes of the Indeed Entry-Level redesign.

Participants completed core tasks such as browsing entry-level jobs and submitting an application while sharing observations. The testing focused on identifying moments of mild confusion or hesitation so the experience could be simplified further before final design implementation.

Issues:

•

Some participants experienced minor confusion seeing Student, Internship, and Experienced roles displayed together.

•

A few paused briefly to determine which section applied to them.

•

A couple of participants expected filtering options earlier in the process.

Solution:

• Converted career level options into a dropdown selector.

• Grouped the feed by career stage with clear entry-level tagging, so users land in the section that applies to them without self-judging.

• Relocated search and surfaced filters earlier in the flow, right where participants expected them.

High-fidelity Iteration 2

Usability testing sessions with senior designers

After usability testing sessions with senior designers, I refined the experience to reduce friction and remove unnecessary distractions. The updates focused on simplifying navigation, strengthening clarity on the landing page, and keeping users fully engaged during the application process.

Key Improvements

Moved search functionality directly onto the landing page to eliminate an extra navigation step.
Integrated the search bar within the hero section and updated the hero messaging for stronger intent and clarity.
Added visible search filters on the landing page for quicker job refinement.
Removed the previously added “Need Career Help?” text and link based on feedback to reduce visual clutter.
Eliminated top navigation elements (messages, notifications, profile) during the application stepper to avoid distraction.
Removed the bottom navigation during the apply flow to prevent unintended exits and maintain focus until submission.

The shipped experience. A structured audit of edge cases, states, and accessibility, executed with AI assistance under my direction.

High-fidelity Iteration 3

For the final iteration I worked with AI as a production partner, directing it through structured design reviews while I owned every decision. Together we extended the flow beyond the happy path and added the stages most designs skip. Job cards gained an explicit Entry-Level tag, filters moved into a bottom sheet with clear selected states, and every form field received inline validation with an error summary. New screens covered the fragile moments: an empty state with a recovery action, an applied state that prevents duplicate submissions, a discard dialog that appears only when data would be lost, and a submitting overlay. Every change was checked against the token system and WCAG contrast requirements before it landed. The result is the shipped experience: calm on the surface, accounted for underneath.

Prototype Link

Outcome

The outcome is a focused, mobile-first redesign that feels intentional rather than overwhelming. Every screen answers Aisha's quiet question, "Am I doing this right?", so entry-level users move from discovery to submitted application with less hesitation and more confidence.

Takeaways

Small structural changes can significantly reduce hesitation. Relocating search and pre-selecting career stage did more than any new feature.

Removing distractions improves completion more than adding features. The most impactful decisions in this project were subtractions.
Clear hierarchy and step-based flows create predictability, and predictability is what confidence feels like from inside the interface.

Impact:

Clearer career-stage selection, so Aisha never self-judges eligibility against a mixed feed.

Navigation suppressed during the apply flow, keeping users fully focused until submission.
A guided, state-complete experience, with errors, empty states, and recovery paths designed rather than left to chance.

What I learned:

Simplifying an experience does not mean reducing functionality. It means prioritizing intention. Minor layout decisions, like relocating search or suppressing navigation during critical steps, influence user confidence more than any visual flourish. I also learned to treat feedback as a design material: both rounds of iteration came directly from structured reviews, and the discipline of auditing edge cases at the end, every error, empty, and exit state, is where a design earns the word finished.

Next Steps

Design and ship the tablet and desktop breakpoints, extending the mobile-first system to a fully responsive experience. Early tablet exploration is already underway.
Refine filters and job card clarity based on behavioral insights from future testing.
Explore application tracking and saved jobs across devices, extending confidence beyond the moment of submission.

Design and ship the tablet and desktop breakpoints, extending the mobile-first system to a fully responsive experience. Early tablet exploration is already underway.
Refine filters and job card clarity based on behavioral insights from future testing.
Explore application tracking and saved jobs across devices, extending confidence beyond the moment of submission.

Conduct moderated usability testing with a broader group of recent graduates to validate the confidence thesis at scale.