Designing a Trustworthy, Low-Friction Platform for On-Demand Community Support Services

Purpose — This study explores the needs, expectations, and trust concerns of users seeking everyday community support services — such as home repairs, caregiving, tutoring, and local errands — through a digital platform. It examines service discovery, provider trust and verification, booking clarity, pricing transparency, and accessible, responsive design. Based on these insights, it proposes a user-centred approach to designing a more trustworthy, transparent, and low-friction service-booking experience, developed through the design of a platform, Sahyog. Design/methodology/approach — A user-centred design (UCD) approach structured around the Double-Diamond model was adopted over a seven-week UI/UX design internship. Secondary research into on-demand service-marketplace behaviour was combined with a competitive audit of leading service platforms. The findings informed personas, journey maps, information architecture, user flows, a component-driven design system, low- to high-fidelity screens, an interactive prototype, and moderated usability testing focused on the booking and checkout flow. Findings — Users experience friction across provider discovery, trust and verification, and — most acutely — the booking/checkout flow. They value clear provider credentials, transparent and upfront pricing, simple multi-step booking, and responsive, accessible screens across devices. Reducing booking steps and surfacing trust signals (verification badges, ratings, past-work evidence) emerged as the highest-impact design opportunities. Practical implications — The study demonstrates how user research and a reusable design system can inform community-support platforms that simplify discovery, comparison, and booking while remaining consistent, responsive, and accessible. Originality/value — The study contributes a trust-first, booking-focused, user-centred perspective to service-marketplace design, translating everyday user needs into concrete design decisions and positioning verification, transparent pricing, and responsive accessibility as core considerations.