.svg)
The problem and context
With Mueen's rapidly growing presence in Saudi Arabia, it is essential to update the customer-facing apps to boost conversions, retention, and revenue. The current platform meets basic user needs but lacks the intuitive and cutting-edge design required by today’s design-conscious consumers. To support Mueen’s expansion plans, the next version of the apps must offer a more impactful and user-friendly experience. We have developed a tailored plan to achieve these goals, ensuring the platform not only meets but exceeds user expectations.
Introducing Inktrap
We're a London-based team of digital product designers and developers who specialise in making B2C digital products easy to use.
Your experienced product design and development team
After initially focusing on designing and building MVPs for early-stage startups, over the past 11 years we’ve grown to work with larger companies like Tysers, Humn and PwC’s innovation team. We deliver new products and features, or, work as an embedded team improving existing software, making sure it delivers what users actually need.
We’re all about making the digital world easy to navigate, building interfaces that are intuitive to use, maintain and allow people to get the job done. We’re a small, highly effective team all based in and around (occasionally) sunny London who love things design and tech related.
Our values are the core of everything we do
We’re problem solvers
We make products that solve real business problems. They look great doing it too, but function comes first.
We put people first
People are at the core of everything, whether they’re a user of your product or a member of our team.
We take pride in our work
We pay attention to the details, and make sure things are done right, not just done.
We’re open and honest
We’re honest about our opinions, and transparent in how we work. We value fairness, clarity and integrity.
We protect the planet
The planet is burning and we have a duty to protect it. We work to reduce the environmental impact of our business.
Our experience
Having worked on well over 100 products in the past 11 years, we have a broad range of experience across industries and technologies. We’ve designed risk insight platforms for startups, built membership platforms, created learning tools for multinational corporations and everything in-between.
We take pride in our ability to really understand the goals of our stakeholders and the users of their products which leads to a better solution in less time, using our tried and tested process we can apply to any brief.
Our recommended approach
Our product development philosophy is rooted in an iterative process that leverages user feedback to inform design decisions. This approach ensures that each stage of development is guided by real user insights, allowing us to create solutions that are both user-centric and deliver business objectives. By rapidly launching new software versions, we gather usage analytics and feedback to continuously optimise performance against key business metrics.
We will support you over an initial 9-month period to research, design, and build new versions of both the Mueen web and mobile apps, collaborating closely with your in-house back-end development team. This approach ensures a dynamic and user-centric product evolution, aligning with your growth and business objectives.
Why this approach works
- Designed with a primary focus on your business objectives, ensuring that all development efforts align with your strategic goals
- Prioritises the needs of your customers, with design decisions being predominantly driven by concrete data gleaned from user analytics
- Boasts adaptability, providing us with the capacity to quickly pivot and adjust our approach based on evolving needs and circumstances
- Structured into distinct stages, each with its own clear and precise objectives and plan, fostering an orderly and systematic development process
- Emphasises speed and efficiency, enabling us to launch the updated application promptly, getting it into the hands of your users as quickly as possible
Research
To begin, we must pinpoint specific areas for improvement. This involves a deep understanding of Mueen's business objectives, technological capabilities, and user needs. We undertake a comprehensive analysis, merging insights from these areas to create a detailed design specification. This document will clearly outline the essential elements for the new designs, ensuring we address all critical requirements and deliver a solution that aligns perfectly with your goals.
Define UX metrics aligned with business KPIs
We will collaborate to understand Mueen's KPIs and link them to UX metrics such as average contract value, user onboarding completion rates, and number of contracts signed. These metrics will help track the success of our design updates and ensure they add measurable value.
Implement analytics
Integrating analytics into the app is crucial to tracking user behaviour, which is currently missing. Once implemented, we will gain insights into user activities and navigation patterns, as well as identify underused features. This data will highlight areas needing updates and enhancements. Setting up analytics will be our immediate priority, with frequent reviews starting after the first full week of data collection. This approach ensures we make informed decisions to continuously improve the app's user experience and effectiveness.
Conduct UX audit
While collecting analytics data, we'll conduct a comprehensive UX audit of both the web and mobile platforms. Leveraging our extensive experience with similar products, we'll pinpoint areas for improvement that will benefit users and align with Mueen’s business KPIs. This audit will result in a detailed action plan to enhance the user experience, focusing on information architecture, user flow, micro-interactions, accessibility, styling, and feature enhancements. This targeted approach ensures that every aspect of the user journey is optimised for maximum impact.
Parallel Product Analysis
We will conduct a thorough Parallel Product Analysis to understand how leading apps have tackled similar challenges. This involves evaluating their features, functionality, and design. By identifying what works well and what doesn't, we can adopt the most effective strategies and avoid common pitfalls. This approach ensures that we leverage proven solutions to deliver an exceptional user experience for Mueen’s users. The range of apps we’d evaluate include:
Task Rabbit & Air Tasker - leading providers of home services powered by their web and mobile apps
Raha & Dari - direct competitors to Mueen, providing home services in Saudi Arabia
Service Market - an app for booking and managing home services within UAE
Maid - a new UK app for hiring cleaners
Bubble - leading childcare app in the UK
Create a Prioritised Specification
Creating a detailed design specification is crucial for clearly outlining the improvements needed and their rationale. This document will prioritise changes based on their predicted impact on Mueen’s KPIs and related measurable UX metrics. By doing so, we ensure that every update is strategically aligned with business goals, enhancing user experience and driving measurable results. The specification will serve as a roadmap, guiding the development process and ensuring all stakeholders are aligned on the project's objectives and expected outcomes.
Design
During the design phase, we use the detailed design specification to guide the creation of key features and functionalities. First, we develop rough blueprints (wireframes) to map out user journeys, converting these into interactive prototypes. These prototypes are rigorously tested to ensure they meet user needs. Once validated, we craft a fresh, attractive user interface (UI), transforming wireframes with engaging colours, typefaces, and imagery. This structured approach ensures that each design element is purposeful, user-centric, and aligned with Mueen’s business objectives.
User experience design (UX)
User flow designs
Using insights from our research, we will map out optimal user flows, ensuring users achieve their goals effortlessly. We begin with low-fidelity layouts, progressively adding detail through close collaboration with your team. With each iteration, we refine and enhance these flows, ensuring they are intuitive, efficient, and perfectly aligned with Mueen’s objectives. This iterative and collaborative approach guarantees a seamless user experience, driving higher engagement and retention rates.
Wireframe prototypes for testing
To ensure our solution is on the right track, we will create low-fidelity wireframe prototypes for usability testing. Once user flows are finalised, we will develop visualisations of each screen, linked together to form interactive prototypes. These prototypes will effectively communicate improvements to your team and serve as a basis for usability testing. We will iteratively refine these wireframes, incorporating feedback and making updates, until we establish the precise steps and layouts for each screen within the user flows. This iterative process ensures the final design is both functional and user-friendly.
User interface design (UI)
Designing an updated visual style
Revamping the User Interface (UI) design is pivotal for transforming Mueen’s app. We will create a fresh, modern visual style while adhering to existing brand guidelines on colour, language, and visual assets. Starting from these guidelines, we will design a clear, accessible, and contemporary interface. This new style will be consistently applied across all screens on both the web and mobile apps, ensuring a cohesive and engaging user experience. This restyling will significantly enhance the overall look and feel, making the interface more appealing and user-friendly.
Creating a component library
The second phase involves creating a component library, a collection of pre-built, reusable components designed for efficiency and consistency. These components range from simple UI elements like buttons and sliders to complex constructs like navigation bars and data tables. By developing a component library for Mueen, we can significantly accelerate the delivery of future updates and new tools while ensuring a consistent and seamless user experience across all customer touchpoints. This strategic approach enhances both development speed and UI uniformity.
Build
The build phase of app development is where the actual coding and creation of the application's functionality take place, transforming designs and plans into a working product. Our role will be the front-end development, implementing UI/UX designs and developing core features while working closely with your back-end team to ensure seamless integration. This phase is crucial because it lays the foundation for the app's functionality, ensures quality through early testing, and addresses integration and scalability. Proper execution during the build phase results in a stable, efficient, and high-quality application, saving time and resources by identifying and fixing issues early.
Feature prioritisation is crucial at the start of the app development phase to determine the build order of new features and updates. Our goal is to deliver updates quickly, enabling users to benefit from the improvements and allowing Mueen to generate revenue sooner. The first release will be the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), with subsequent releases adding more features. This approach ensures a feature-rich product that evolves over time, meeting user needs and aligning with business objectives, guided by our KPI-derived UX metrics.
We offer flexibility and a collaborative approach and will develop the application’s front-end alongside your existing back-end team. We’ll work with them in 2-weekly sprint cycle to frequently deliver the feature updates. Given the extensive design updates required, we propose rebuilding the front-end applications in React Native. This allows for a unified codebase deployable across web, iOS, and Android, accelerating development time. React Native is a robust and well-supported technology, ensuring a faster, more efficient development process and consistent user experience across all platforms.
Iterate and support
A digital product is never truly finished; it continuously evolves. We’ll be on-hand to support this evolution, providing ongoing updates and support. Guided by usage analytics and your updated business objectives, we’ll identify, prioritise, and deliver impactful updates on a sprint basis. Our initial support includes four additional sprints post-launch, with a 2-week gap to allow data accumulation. Beyond this, we offer continued support in design, development, or product management, with specific needs to be reassessed in spring 2025. This ensures your product remains aligned with Mueens evolving goals.
Timeframes and costs
We propose a comprehensive 9-month engagement to design, build, and launch the updated apps, targeting a launch by the end of January 2025. Work will commence in August 2024. The subsequent support phase will extend until April 2025, allowing us to refine the apps and assess future needs. This phased approach ensures you can choose between continued support from us or transitioning to your in-house team for ongoing updates. This timeline ensures a smooth, efficient process, delivering high-quality results aligned with your goals.
The estimated cost for this engagement is 1,000,000 SAR. This will be broken down into 3 separate phases, so you don’t need to make an upfront commitment to the whole workload. The approximate timeframes and costs for these phases are:
- Research and Design - 2 months, 337,000 SAR
- Build (front-end) - 4 months, 453,000 SAR
- Iterate and support - 2 months, 210,000 SAR
Our approach is designed to adapt as objectives and methods evolve, providing the flexibility needed for successful project completion. This phased strategy allows for adjustments to estimates before each phase begins, ensuring accurate budgeting while maintaining fixed costs for each segment. This method ensures we deliver high-quality results aligned with your evolving needs, offering both stability and adaptability throughout the project.
Merlie Calvert
Founder, Farillio
Work examples
We've selected three relevant examples from our portfolio that use similar approaches and technologies to those we'd use with Mueen.
PwC Learning Lab
Services
Strategy, UX and UI design, design system, build support
PwC Learning Lab is a training product designed to enhance learning and retention by spacing out the intervals at which information is presented to the learner. The platform uses the principles of spaced repetition, gamification, and deep personalisation to optimise long-term memory retention.
We led the strategy and design for the product, including experiences for the learners, course creators and administrators. The solution has since been successfully rolled out for use by many large, global organisations.
Research and design phase
Flock Risk Insights Platform
Services
Discovery, UX/UI design, front-end development
Stack
React, Typescript, Tailwind, Axios
Flock Risk Insights is a new platform that provides fleet managers with a comprehensive overview of their fleet's risk profile and helps them make data-driven decisions to improve safety and reduce insurance premiums.
In addition to designing the product we were also deeply embedded within the Flock team to work on the React / TypeScript application. This involved creating a range of new components to display complex risk and telematics data from their backend systems. Our collaborative approach enabled them to launch the new risk insights features to users in under 3 months, meeting their strict deadline.
From initial meeting to launch
The Growing Coaches
Services
Strategy, discovery, UX/UI design, front-end development, back-end developer
Stack
Laravel, React, Blade, SASS, AWS
The Growing Coaches is an online platform designed specifically for trainee executive coaches looking to connect with potential coachees. The platform uses an algorithm to match coaches with coachees based on their skills, experience, and areas of expertise.
Working on a sprint basis, we built the MVP across 3 months which included a matching algorithm, the ability to for both user types to manage their coaching sessions and track progress, plus, in later releases a Zoom integration.
Active coaches in the first six months
Terms and policies
We work under our standard terms of business which cover payment terms, warranties, responsibilities, IP, liabilities, confidentiality and dispute resolution (among other things).
With a decade’s experience and trusted by large corporations, we’ve put a few policies and work requirements in place over the years:
- We have a change management policy & a business continuity plan in place to manage any large, unforeseen changes to the project plan, personnel or business conditions.
- We have a security and incident management policy in place to handle any data breaches (although we haven’t had to use this yet).
- We work confidentially as per our standard terms of business. Your confidential data is confidential for a reason and we respect that with all members of our team and anyone else we bring onboard bound by the same terms Inktrap are.
- We have a data processing agreement and comply with GDPR requirements.
- We have professional indemnity insurance coverage of up to £5,000,000, so if there are any issues no-one is left out of pocket.
Next steps
If you have any questions about this proposal, please get in touch with James. We’d love to talk you through this proposal, so please schedule a call with if you’d like to chat.
