E3mal

A little over a year ago, my team was briefed for a service app, code named — “Sharakh” at that time, designed specifically for audiences in the middle east. It peaked my interest, not just because of the nature of the app, but the challenge associated with making a region specific solution, with a very short deadline. The product was bilingual —  Arabic and English, which has its own challenges, but more importantly we needed to focus on what approach would be best suited for our business and user goals in accordance to the market we will be launching it in.

Objective & Purpose

After our first meeting with the clients, we understood that their vision was to bring job seekers and job creators together in one platform. In summary  —
 we were to create a platform where we enable people to connect with and hire job seekers to execute jobs.
 

Baby Steps

During our requirement gathering phase, we moved from "classifieds" model to a more categorised approach. Our research indicated that more we could differentiate between the two user groups (Job Seeker & Job Poster) the better. We started with defining “jobs”. Because the jobs were mainly service requests from house-hold chores to a translation services (which is a pretty popular service request in the middle east). Among other things, keeping business objective in mind, we chose the "Bidding" model.

The next step was identifying problems and current solutions in the market

The difficulty was to find contractors with experience in special fields. Our secondary research also showed that it was a challenge to find a part time or side job in the middle eastern market. Current solutions, included poorly made classifieds columns which were chaos to interact with. Other than that the only other source was a referral from a family/friend.
 

Identifying Audience and Early Adopters

Our preliminary research suggested to target small businesses, event managers, and professionals looking to making a side income with part time jobs; even students from the university looking for smaller contracts. As forcustomers, we discovered specific data on how they conducted business and ran contracts like these in these middle east markets. QUALITY is the highest factor in picking service providers . For example, house-keeping can be contracted and then it will be completed without sometimes even seeing the staff in person, all done in such a professional manner that there are no questions about safety or any disputes. This culture demanded that the app experience should be the same if not better. We finished with our lean canvas and moved to mind mapping the entire scope.

Identifying the Purpose

Our next step was to create the mind map on a high level. Also keeping in focus that we needed a scalable MVP model. We settled on IOS for the platform, it had approx 35% of the market share and our stats showed that the economy segment we were trying to breach contains far more iOS users, specially in the job creators category.

We stepped in card sorting next, deep diving into functionalities of the product and creating the user journeys. I wish we had the primary research data as well on this one to conduct empathy mapping of the process however, time constraints were a big issue for the client and we had to rely on secondary research and data to get the journey mapping right. We also had the opportunity to conduct an informal research session with a few people living there via video calls. It gave us a personal look at the culture and understanding of the place, it also helped us to empathise with both personas much more.

We also consolidated a list of key features from a non-functional perspective to give us a better insight into the product.

Skelton and Identity

It was very clear from the beginning that the smarter way would be to distribute the platform in two user groups  —  Contractors (Job Seekers) and Customers (Job Creators). We started with wire framing and eventually made a high fidelity flow with the understanding of two personas and keeping two critical things in mind.

• The experience should be scalable to a bigger business model eventually.
• The UI should have unique branding to accommodate two different languages — English (Left to Right) and Arabic (Right to Left). However, mirroring still has its limitations.

It was worth noting that even though fixed text could be in Arabic, the input text from the user can be in English (in Arabic version). We started with flows of Job creator/Client and Job seeker/Contractor.

UI and Branding

The visuals were to be simple yet classy, minimalist yet sophisticated. The splash screen beautifully portrays the City of Riyadh and gives you an option to switch over to Arabic during signup. Here is a glimpse inside Sharakh which was renamed to E3mal (akh-mal) when it launched.

Ending

Bi-lingual applications have their own challenges and if you are breaching a market where culture plays a big role, stakes get high dramatically. Our first set of users responded quite positively with the product not only validating the experience but giving owners a boost of confidence. And now E3mal is live and ready to take over the Middle Eastern market.

To check out the app, Click Here