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The SalamaTech project supports Syrian civil society and human rights defenders to operate safely and effectively online. Since the project launch in 2012, the SalamaTech team has helped tens of thousands of Syrians learn how to stay safe online in Syria and the region, through training, emergency response, awareness campaigns, and expert support.

This project operates mainly online because of the difficult state of affairs in the region. Their website and social media are essential tools to reach people in distress.

Problem

In 2017 the numbers of the site starting dropping down dramatically, putting at risk the continuation of the main SecDev Foundation’s project. We needed to find out what was happening with our users, and change the page in order to revert the problem.

Target Audience:

Women, youth, and civil society organizations located in Syria, needing digital citizenship education, in order to be safe online.

Less is More, says the wise words.

After doing several interviews and questionnaires with our local teams and beneficiaries, we realized that the website that had been recently re-done by an in-project developer, contained too many graphics and effects (parallax effects, animations) and with a wartime internet it was almost impossible to load. 

We talked to the end-user and they expressed they didn’t need fancy graphics. they just needed a fast loading site, where they could easily find useful information. 

I was responsible for the new development. The first thing I did after reading the interview and survey data, was to meet with our in-house developer to assess what could we do to optimize loading times.

We decided to do a page with a very light image at the beginning with the project definition, and the rest to do it text-based. 

I created the wireframes, taking into account that Arabic is written right to left.

I did the high fidelity mockup which was reviewed by our Syrian partners, while our developer builds the base structure of the site. 

I created all the visual assets and supervised the site followed the approved design. 

Currently, images have been added to articles again, because most of the people in our reach, use Turkish internet which is better than the local providers.

This is an ongoing project based in Cambodia, we are teaching young people about online security. This is the first initiative of this kind in the country and have been growing very fast since we began. I was in charge of the UX/UI of the website, Brand creation and integration with all the products. As well as teaching the local team to generate and use their visual resources.

The color palette is vibrant and the character design is manga, to resonate within the young population in Cambodia which has a lot of influence from this comic style aesthetics.

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The idea of the team was to have a beehive hexagon team as the main navigation of the training topics. The main idea of the navigation flow is for the user to never have to click the back button in order to reach to any place on the site. they should always have guidance and movement freedom.

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All the visuals were created in Adobe XD and ran through different youth groups in Cambodia, to ensure it was easy and pleasant to navigate.

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The webapp will be launched this summer. The social media accounts are already growing exponentially everyday.

Foodwize is a food-tech startup that was born out of the necessity of co-working spaces and small companies to offer lunch and dinner options to their clients. 

In 2019 an old friend told me that he wanted to create a connected canteen to provide local and ultra-fresh food to the co-working spaces he has been using for one year. In his opinion, the options offered were not good, and waiting for delivery required an extra level of planning that he didn’t have time to.

The project is user-oriented since the beginning before starting to design the solution, we launched a questionnaire to understand what the consumers think of the food experience in coworking spaces, and we interviewed managers of 2 co-working spaces (WeWork and spaces) to access the real market possibility.  We found out that 75% out of 145 questionnaires were not happy with the existing options and all the companies expressed the unsustainable cost of having a cafeteria that could offer high-quality food. 

Problem:

How to develop a canteen service that allows the users to get high quality, local, ultra-fresh food, in no time with the less contact possible.  

Challenges: 

• Budget. the solution must allow charging 12 Euros per full meal.
• Contactless. Hygiene-wise we need to assure the consumers that the least people possible were in contact with their food.
• Easy access. interviewed people said, they think delivery services are too slow for their life rhythm, Foodwize must be quicker than them
• Create a sense of community, promote our vendors.

UX/UI lead designer and Creative Director. 

I am in charge of generating a cohesive service experience for the users. Based on the architecture designed by a systems engineer I developed a series of digital products that make the internal and external processes in the startup to be almost automated and easy to use. I lead the experience and brand design in parallel. Conductor user testing sessions and continue to be part of the planning for each product growth according to ti the user’s needs.

Let’s Feed them

I analyzed the service architecture and identified the main products to be developed in order to have a Minimum Viable Product. the answer was:

• A mobile app that allows the user to explore the canteen’s content and to open the canteen. 
• A corporate website, to attract investors and communicate the idea of the startup
• Custom CMS to control the content of the website and the mobile application. 

I created a navigation map of each product and the relation between them.

I did a wireframe in Google Slides, and user flows creating personas that would represent each user case. This wireframe was tested by 10 potential users in Paris, from 2 different we-work coworking spaces.

I created a High fidelity prototype, while the development team was preparing their working environment using Adobe XD. this prototype was tested by the whole team and a total of 12 potential users in France.

I followed up with the team, providing assets and supervising the UI development. After every sprint, our app and our website would have an internal testing session.  once we got to a big milestone, we would invite external users to test the app, and give us feedback.

The CMS is able to control all the content in the app. Including a web app that does the nutritional facts calculations and automatically fills the Database fields.

And one of the most exciting things was to design the experience between our canteen and the user, in which we partnered with an industrial designer to evaluate the flow of the experience and take decisions such as which way the door should open. And how with a LED logo we can communicate clearly with our consumers regarding the interaction with the door.

The 1st prototype was done and tested the app positively and the 1st canteen is being built at the moment.