Indeed phone number login (India)

Enabling millions of lightly-skilled jobseekers in India to join Indeed without an email address

The Project

In 2023-2024, I joined this project mid-flight as the sole UX designer, taking over from a colleague to shepherd the MVP through to launch. Working across global teams, I served as the UX point of contact across multiple product teams and stakeholders, ensuring design consistency, facilitating alignment, and contributing to key flows as we built a phone-based login experience tailored to user behaviour and technical constraints in India.

‍My role: As sole designer, taking over mid-project, I collaborated with:

  • Content design & PM
  • Several of Indeed's core infrastructure teams
  • India UXR team who conducted research with local jobseekers
  • Legal & security team overseeing compliance and phone number recovery

The Problem

In India, many lightly-skilled workers don’t use email and prefer communicating via phone and WhatsApp. Requiring an email address to create an account was a major barrier to adoption.

The Goals

The Scope & Collaboration

What seemed like a simple change — allowing phone number login — actually impacted many core product flows. We had to redesign and validate multiple end-to-end flows:

Each flow was owned by a different product team, requiring extensive cross-functional collaboration. Gaining alignment and securing buy-in across these teams was one of the biggest challenges and successes of the project.

Redesigning core flows. We started by identifying all the touchpoints and collaborating teams, then redesigned all key flows — from account creation to post-apply communication and more.

The Constraints

What we Launched

  • Phone number–only login, signup, and apply flows
  • WhatsApp-based verification and communication (SMS to come post-MVP)
  • Scalable support for non-email accounts

The Impact

  • 12M+ phone number-only accounts created by end of 2024
  • +15% QoQ growth in phone number-only adoption
  • +20% higher login conversion vs. email
  • Enabled more inclusive access for lightly-skilled Indian jobseekers
An image of a hand holding a mobile phone on the login screen of Indeed

What I Learned