A short story… I am the Design Director (Head of UX and Design) of a 🦄 billion-dollar digital bank in Saudi Arabia. I am the team lead of 15+ UX/UI design, UX writer, UX researcher and visual designers, people spread over a variety of offices and disciplines.

As a leader I love helping designers produce their best work. I really enjoyed being involved in the conceptual discussions, helping integrate design-thinking across the business, embedding human-centered design practices in engineering teams. I was good at it. I want to help lead others, and I also want to design.

Head of Design

Through a bit of trial and error, I discovered the Principal Design and team leads roles — positions I’ve held at various tech companies since. I get asked a lot what a Principals actually does, and whilst I can’t answer for every company — I can tell you what I do 🤔.

In my experience, it’s been a role where I get to practice my craft (i.e. feature design, working with engineers, shipping cool stuff to customers) whilst also helping other designers produce their best work. I lead by example, whilst coaching other designers to achieve excellence on their own terms.

It’s leadership, but in the sense that I’m accountable to the success of other people… but not responsible. That’s how I measure my success — if the people around me feel more creative, productive and supported in their role… then I’ve done a good job.

The role plays out to be about 60% hands-on feature work, and 40% design operations. The hands-on work for a Principal tends to be higher impact, more strategically important features — or projects that need a bit of a helping hand. The remaining 40% is a bit fuzzier, but is defined by making sure everyone has what they need to do great work — that varies place to place, but is mostly covered by design operations, coaching and communicating the work with the stakeholders.

Design Ops ⚡️

In this capacity I make sure the teams I work with have the tools and processes necessary to do their best work. That can take many forms, and ranges from building out and scaling design systems, finding new ways to collaborate remotely, writing documentation on how to work more effectively, or simply maintaining the suite of tools necessary for modern, user-centered design.

The way I approach the above is to look for ways teams work that don’t scale, or where certain struggles have become commonplace — and build structure around them. At Campaign Monitor that involved building better relations between design and engineering, at the bank is was to find ways to help designers feel more inspired and creative, I established design systems and facilitated remote communication, and I’ve been building collaborative practices.

Coaching

In 2017 I opened my coaching practice, Rookiup and Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) as a way to gain more exposure to designers outside my immediate role. Since then I’ve had the pleasure and absolute privilege to coach 200+ designers from all over the world.

I see myself as an ally ☺️ to the people I coach, both within the companies I work for and freelancers. I help my people navigate career growth, develop concepts and overcome tough creative challenges — with a focus on happiness, creativity and mental wellbeing. I lead with curiosity, honesty and vulnerability — and in doing so I’ve learned an incredible amount about design, communication and myself.

I’ve coached designers from household names like Facebook, Zillow and Uber — but also talent from emerging markets like Nigeria, India and Brazil — from juniors just setting out, to seniors navigating burnout. It’s hard to know the impact you have as a coach, but people have said some nice things about me…

My Role: I designed the UX, IA and UI for this project.

To help parents and teachers keep children safe online, the MOTC (formerly known as the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology) launched a website filled with valuable information and resources on cyber safety.

Users are guided through the site by cartoon characters Saif and Saqr, who were developed by Graphic Designer, Samar Semaan. She created the characters to help make the topic of cyber safety less scary and more accessible to youth.

Saif represents a typical Qatari boy who is curious about the world that exists online. Saqr, a falcon, is Saif’s wise sidekick, who helps him make the right choices. The characters are featured throughout the site, and will be used for future games and youth outreach initiatives.

Design Option 1

Design Option 2

My Role: I designed the UX and IA for this project.

Autoquake Finance Customer Entry Points Map First Page

Autoquake-wireframes

Reach out. Let’s be creative together!

Consider this: 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.

As you can see, a weak UX will be hugely detrimental to your brand. Senseless functional paths? Site not mobile-friendly? These seemingly small mishaps – amongst countless others – can ruin your customers’ user experience and eliminate them as a potential repeat customer.

Fortunately, I have the knowledge and experience to help remedy even the slightest detail negatively impacting your digital product’s UX through my user experience design services.

User Experience Design is a critical component to a website because:

People expect a fast, organized, easy-to-find, and resourceful website (people have high expectations today)

Businesses expect a website to work for them (ROI is no longer a “nice to have”)

to accomplish both, you need great UX.

Whether you’re revamping a website / Mobile App / Smart TV App / Smart watch, starting anew, or iterating — my consultation will help:

1. Ensure everything (from initial planning to final launch) goes smoothly.
2. Invest in the right amount of research (most companies underspend).
3. Users of the website get what they want.
4. You (the business) are getting what they want (ROI!).
5. Maintain brand standards throughout.
6. and much more!

This should help you to understand how I do benchmark, UX analytics, data analytics, user insights, usability work…etc for digital products.

They took my end-to-end experiance design and we blend  my services with the company as the following:

NEXTWO provides UX strategy including end-to-end experience design, research and strategy.

We are passionate about the design and creation of product and service experiences, whether those experiences involve physical products, face-to-face, online, or bricks-and-mortar interactions.

Check the final work design from here!

Jarir is the largest retailer of books and consumer electronics in Saudi Arabia with a wide range of trade operations that has placed Jarir at the forefront of the Kingdom’s offline and online retailers.

Jarir wished to implement innovative solutions that increase product visibility and conversion rates via the Jarir Mobile website and Windows 10 application. With big ideas on how to leverage Jarir’s online presence as it embarks upon ambitious expansion plans, we offered a comprehensive strategy that allows Jarir to push its much-loved app and highlight the great products it offers in a smarter way.

This is a good example for how I am doing the Usability analytics, benchmarking, Ideation and business potential…

Oh! Not another WhatsApp message from a client at one in the morning!

Being a UX researcher and designer, I encounter a challenge managing different clients, different teams, and different processes. Which frustrate me a lot because I have to follow-up on so many platforms and with many stakeholders.

I decided that it is about time to find a solution, where I can consolidate all my processes, communications, assets, and clients. My final goal is to deliver the UX research and design process along with the requirement gathering in a systemic manner; that allows me and teams I collaborate with to build products and services people need, use, and cherish.

Many of my clients are based in Dubai, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia where there is no formal UX research and design process is defined as the case in the world.

So where do I go? Google Search obviously, my best and first option. I found books with 1200+ pages, 15-paged websites with the history of project management, images of diagrams and finally!! Guess what?

I decided to divide my process into eight tasks that helps all stakeholders to understand the status of the project we are working on, collaborate, and give feedback. These tasks cover those areas:

1. Project Management boards
2. Assets Repository management
3. File sharing
4. Project timelines
5. UI Design
6. UI feedback collection
7. Collaboration with developers

Task 1 — Slack: Communications

We need to create a formal method for communication which we can reference and archive, therefore I decided to use Slack. Using Slack, I create an individual channel for every client project, in each channel there all the team members involved in the project, CTO, and myself.

We shared documents, images, links, and feedback in the channel.

This keeps every stakeholder in the team up to speed on any changes in the project direction.

Task 2 — Trello: Project Management Boards

Working with several projects, there were several items that we collect each time starting from the business model canvas, ending with feature planning. Therefore, I decided to use Trello to do project management boards.

Trello allowed stakeholders to manage business model canvas, requirements suggestions, long discussions, managing new requests, latest mockups, design iterations linked from Invision, Sprints planning, features, and many others.

Task 3 — Dropbox: Assets repository management

Although slack is an effective communication channel, but it is not the greatest in terms of file management. Therefore, I decided to use Dropbox where all the stakeholders can upload and access documents.  I advocate this method because we just share a link to a file instead of uploading a new version of each file each time.

Task 4 — Slack: All files pinned to project channels

Since all the files are on Dropbox, I just pin the important files on the slack channel, I usually pin wireframes PDFs, site images JPGs, contract PDF, prototypes…etc.

We pin the contract in the slack channel, so each team member knows what we contractually bound to do

Task 5 — Teamgantt: Project timelines

Goodbye Excel, creating timelines charts on Excel and sharing them was A LOT OF WORK! Now I am using TeamGantt for creating timelines and sharing with the team

TeamGantt detailed out the intended timeline so easily, I had the same expectation the client did in terms of meetings and milestones. The project timeline was pinned to the project slack channel.

It is critical for the success of any project to have aligned expectations with the client

Task 6 — Sketch: UI Design

I always start with information architecture to get an idea of what the clients values and how they see their customers.

I advocate to work directly on mockups and iterate over it because it’s more understandable from the clients and stakeholders, and we don’t have enough time to educate them about the benefits of wireframes especially that they are going to judge your work immediately and will not understand the value in the addition that it takes time, just for fun I had the approval from one of my biggest clients on the wireframe and the client want us to start development!!.

Task 7 — UI Feedback Collection

Collecting feedback from different stakeholders is a hustle, after evaluating some tools I decided to use Zeplin which is a masterpiece once added to Sketch. Simply add the Zeplin plugin to Sketch then export the designs to Zeplin and collect feedback.

Invision is not bad but still not mature in this area, especially version controlling on designs.

Wireframe example

I will talk about consultation work and wireframing to show case studies in another article.

Task 8 — Zeplin / Invision: Collaboration with developers

All the collected feedback from clients are kept in Slack when is integrated with Zeplin or Invision, this integration helps us to define the design direction.

Personally, I vote for Zeplin because its more convenient for clients and developers.

I could see the smiles on the developers faces when they get the ready to use CSS on the designs, so forget the days of sharing CSS, slicing time and managing those.

Plus: Get everything you want, no more source files shared

It’s still work in progress. You never know, it might work for you agencies and freelancers out there as it’s works for me!

Get in touch!  Send me how you are working and let’s have a talk and discuss.

I come from an art and graphic design background, that type of schooling helped me get ideas from different sources, sometimes that means making ideas out of old ones. On other occasions, I get that “Eureka” moment, like who ran throughout the city naked when he discovered that the spelled water volume is equal to his body’s volume. Just like Archimedes

I want to develop my ideas into useful and valuable products, that solve our customers problems. This works with art not with building real good digital products.

I am an advocate of the “Design School” of thought, where User Experience is identified as the process of satisfying “user’s” personal or/and business “needs” using “design”. In My Opinion User Experience can be briefed into:

Needs + Process + Design + Context(environment) + Time + Business

Traditionally, building digital products required product owners/designers to deliver the following:

1. User Personas, stories, and Scenarios (User + Task + Environment).
2. Sitemaps
3. Taxonomies (Vocabulary used in a product)
4. Content/Copy strategies.
5. Wireframes, UI elements, and mockups.
6. Usability test plans & results.
7. Refined prototypes.

Delivering those elements meant spending a fair amount of time, as each one of those items marched as an independent entity. Leading design agencies such as IDEO figured out the need to build organized UX frameworks to manage those elements, therefore they standardized their .

IBM innovated their Design Thinking Framework, where they took the same approach as IDEO of phasing the product development process.  Both of those organizations are the leaders in educating and training designers.

Those processes help product designers to empathize with users, define the problem, and prototype .

To showcase how those frameworks work, I will discuss IDEO’s human-centered design approach which seeks balancing user needs with business expectations using design. IDEO phased the design process into:

1. Observation
2. Ideation
3. Rapid Prototyping
4. User Feedback
5. Iteration
6. Implementation

Besides IBM’s and IDEO’s frameworks there are some frameworks that works depending on the product phase you are at:

1. TARI (Trigger, Action, Reward, Investment)

2. USMO (User, Situation, Motivation, Outcome)

3. JTBD (Jobs To Be Done)

4. BASIC (Beauty, Accessibility, Simplicity, Intuitiveness, Consistency)

5. HEART (Happiness, Engagement, Accessibility/Adoption, Retention, Task Success)

This article contained little insights I’ve gained in designing digital products through my experience in building workspaces, S-Mart, Shifa and the others projects in my portfolio.

Using these frameworks to build customer-centered products is very important because it emphasize on the user needs during different stages of product building. They helped us align business goals with customer needs. This is achieved by revolving the business goals around the user’s needs. Personally, I do not want to build a product that does not solve the user’s needs.

At the end of the day, what decides if a product is successful or not is if the product actually meets the user’s needs and achieving the business goals at the same time which governed mainly by user experience.

You can also read more about one of my experienced user experience processes in my presentations. You can learn more how I manage the projects day to day in 8 Tasks Process For Managing UX And Design Projects article also.

As a UX Designer and creative director living in Jordan working for UAE, KSA and Jordanian clients, I got engaged with a lot’s of digital products.

Artworks and illustrations were my gateway to the creative industry which led me to the first steps in the digital world.

In this thoughts, I will explain all that most of my clients, partners and investors ask me about for a quick answer in the future.

Art Direction

Starting with basic websites several years ago I found myself working as an Art Director for complex projects with a holistic approach soon. Visually appealing designs, subtle details and brand guidelines combined to innovative interfaces across various touch points became my daily companion.

Out of this love for aesthetic design my passion for functionality and structure evolved. Jumping right into Photoshop didn’t feel accurate anymore and skipping the steps of building a framework based on functionality and usability became inevitable.

User Experience Design

A user-centered mindset and sensitivity for design turned out to be the perfect fit when collaborating with agencies, clients and brands to develop digital concepts and solve problems together.

This rough framework outlines my common used process of developing a digital experiences:

1. Research and gather the present state.
2. Structure setup and content of the project.
3. Concept and Strategy.
4. Create, evaluate and iterate deliverables like A) Personas. B) Site maps. C) Use cases and scenarios. D) User flow. E) Sketches and Infographics. F) Wireframes.
5. High fidelity mockups.
6. Following up with the development team.

You can find more about my user experience processes.

Communicating the conceptual approach / UX strategy and reasoning behind it, is present during the whole process.

To achieve the goal of making the web a better place I trust in teamwork, latest technology and intuition.