Guiding businesses to setup in Dubai
Research intensive project for Meydan Free Zone
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1 | ABOUT THE PROJECT
Meydan: Aiding businesses to set up in Dubai
Meydan Free Zone, located in the heart of Dubai, stands as a contemporary economic free zone. It’s a hub for over 2,000 different types of businesses, including commercial, consulting, investment, and administrative companies. This is also home to a world-class 5-star hotel, an exceptional golf course, and hosts the prestigious Dubai World Cup, known as the world’s richest horse race.
Whether you're a startup looking to establish your presence or an enterprise seeking expansion, Meydan Free Zone aids you in setting up your business.
Domain
Enterprise
Platform
Web & mobile
Duration
8 months
My role
Research
Strategy
Design
Team
Design lead,
Three UX Designers,
Two Visual Designers
2 | CONDUCTING RESEARCH
Conducting on-field research in Dubai
Stakeholder Discovery Sessions 🔍
The primary step was to understand the vision that the clients had for the new product, and the overview of what they wished to achieve from the design activity. We co-strategised and came up with three design principles for the product.
Research Methodologies 🐝
We utilised a 3 point approach to capture maximum insights during the research phase -
01 | User interviews
02 | Stakeholder workshops
Can you find me here?
03 | Design thinking workshops
and here?
Expanse of our Research 🏢
"Our research stint spanned a total of 11 days spanning across 70+ hours in which duration we conducted a total of 38 sessions with 7 personas."
Project
Goals
3 |
01
Self-sufficient & scalable system
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Launch of a service within 1 day with no code
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No-code capabilities to make the system flexible and scalable
02
Ease of execution
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Least touch points for a customer to complete the journey
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Ease of execution for backstage team to complete tasks in the least possible time
03
Transparency & clarity
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Capturing all communication in once place for each persona
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Tailored dashboards per role to track critical metrics and KPIs
4 | RESEARCH SYNTHESIS
Making sense of the mess
Our findings are an outcome of the synthesis of inputs and observations we acquired across the 3 research activities.
Understanding the Meydan Ecosystem 👾
Meydan has 3 key portals that make up the complex system -
Frontstage: Customer-facing portal used by direct customers and channel partners/consultants
Backstage: The backend application processing system for the services applied for
Admin: Controls, deploys and ensures the systems runs smoothly
Understanding the different user personas 🦹♀️
We interviewed 6 key user personas in our research.
For customer-facing portals
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Direct customer
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Channel partner/consultant
For backend portals
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Executive
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Team Lead
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Operations manager
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SMT
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Admin
Synthesising Research 💎
After the intensive research, we synthesised the humungous amounts of data that we had in forms of recordings and observations into meaningful insights.
01 | Affinity mapping of interview findings
01 | Affinity Mapping on Figjam Board
02 | Synthesis to gain insights
02 | Deriving insights from data
Front stage user persona insights 🙆♂️
In this project, I had the key responsibility to design the customer facing portals of Meydan, hence let's understand here the goals, needs, motivations and competencies of the following -
Empathising with the Customer Pain Points 🎧
The most useful insights were the user pain points that were going to guide our design decisions.
5 | INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE & IDEATION
Strategising to optimise the user experience
After collaborating and working closely on research, we diverged responsibilities, and I had the ownership of designing the customer-facing applications.
Information Architecture 🎩
We re-structured the information architecture, and ideated on data-driven features that would fulfil the business goals, correlate to Meydan's design principles and lead to a seamless user experience.
A snapshot of the IA
Service Mapping 🥨
After portal-specific IA improvements, all of us collaborated again to optimise the entire service workflow moving through different portals. I optimised for the customer-facing interaction on the service map. The goal of the optimisations was to align with the stakeholders' goals of creating seamless user journeys with least touch points for a customer and backstage team to complete tasks in the least possible time.
A sample of the optimisation I incorporated on the customer workflow
"Outcome: After the optimisations, we were able to cut down the time taken by 3x, right from customer applying for a service to receiving the final documents."
6 | FINAL SCREENS
Finally the attractive bit
Things I took care of in the final screens 🧩
01 | After initial wireframe iterations, I was directly working with the design system that our visual design team created to ensure scalability, efficiency and consistency with other portals that my teammates were working on.
02 | I was consistently collaborating with the stakeholders, recording the discussions, and applying feedback on the designs. It was a fast-paced iterative process.
03 | I took care of design annotations and developer notes wherever required. Since the platform was being built to be highly configurable by the admin, every flow had to be designed with backend logic for the admin.
04 | I provided states for edge cases, error cases and empty states, to close the loop of the entire flow.
Samples of web & mobile screens
01 | Dashboard
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02 | Company profile
03 | Performance analytics
04 | Services
05 | Application form
7 |
Retrospective
01 | I learnt how to optimise and design efficiently especially when you are working with short deadlines and complex modules. Having a design lead actively overlook all modules, helped us identify design patterns that could be re-used instead of creating from scratch.
02 | The research phase was quite intensive, as we were in a different country, interacting with people of different nationalities for a week. The power of live detailed note-taking became extremely apparent to me. It was just not feasible to go back and listen to hours of all recordings again.
03 | After long hours of interviews, breaks for regrouping with the team and decompressing, both were extremely important in order to absorb and make sense of information.
