Careem is a Dubai-based super-app with operations in over 100 cities, covering 12 countries across the Middle-East, Africa, and South Asia regions. The company, which was valued at over US$2 billion in 2018, became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Uber after being acquired for $3.1 billion in January 2020. Careem expanded into the food delivery business with Careem Now in November 2018 and launched a digital payment platform, Careem Pay in April 2022.

I have been working as UX Lead on this project via Design Studio. 6 months project, divided in different areas of interest and development:

• Product immersion
• Design Strategy
• Design System

As first step we organised download sessions with key stakeholders from Careem to review any existing audits of the product and any user research and/or feedback. In parallel we organised also download sessions with Careem developers to understand any technical limitations, legacy platforms, the current development roadmap, etc. 

All these session have been developed through Miro boards, all from remote working.

Mapping out all the Careem app screens for both Android and IoS.

Conducted a comprehensive review of the product to identify challenges within the user experience, focussing on the core SuperApp experiences (navigation, order & transaction history, saved addresses, profile, language, etc.).

Collecting notes for every area of the super app experience.

Immersion workshop

Run a half-day interactive workshop with representatives from the wider team at Careem to understand the team’s experience using the SuperApp, their candid opinions of the app and where they see the app in five years’ time. 

Through various creative exercises we left the session having identified strengths and weaknesses of the current app, as well as opportunities to achieve the ambitions they have for the app in the near future and in the long-term. 

Developed 3 design concepts derived from Careem’s brand purpose that ultimately deliver on the value proposition of the SuperApp.

The role of the design concepts will be to establish a unified approach to the design system. The concepts has taken into consideration Careem brand pillars and borrowed visual elements from the Careem brand. 

Designed a solution for helping users discover and increase cross vertical activities, and natural ways of handling Loyalty and Pay. This has been achieved through 2 UX workshops where we had co-created a number of solutions to test and validate. 

One of the 6 design sprints that we have been running in less then three months time:

• Defined a product vision for each are of the super app (food, ride, pay, etc..)
• Defined ‘How might we’ product questions
• Competitor analysis (pro & cons)
• Creative exercises (crazy 8, sketches, full concept ideas, etc…)
• Resulted prototypes in lo and hi fidelity

Conducted a detailed audit for Careem verticals and mini-apps to gather all of the components used and understand their purpose/behaviours. 

Based on the audit we have taken all of the discovered components and run the approved design direction across all of them, following the style of our north star experience. As part of this phase we established a set of digital design principles that will underpin all verticals and mini-apps.

• Stakeholders management and interviews
• Competitor analysis
• ‘AS IT IS’ screens map
• Lead 6 design sprints (all remotely through dedicated Miro boards)
• Initial User testing
• Low fidelity prototyping (Figma)
• High fidelity prototyping supervision (worked in team with a lead visual designer from Design Studio). Figma environment
• Design system audit and development (Figma)