Careem
Building a beautiful and scalable design toolkit
Project overview
The leading ride share, shopping and food delivery app in the UAE. Careem wanted to combine these verticals, and more, into a seamless SuperApp experience for its customers.
The project required a top-down rethink of how the app was structured and how best to accomodate Careem's brand pillars and define a vision for the next phase of Careem as a service.
As well as a full UX and visual design overhaul, the project also required the creation of a beautiful new design system and toolkit for future work.
Role:
Lead visual and UI designer : design and creation of a north star app experience and a design system to to support this vision.
The approach
An initial 3 week immersion stage allowed us to learn about all of Careem's verticals, the ambitions for the SuperApp and the issues that the app currently faced in realising these goals.
Starting from the ground up the initial stage was in defining an over arching design strategy for our approach.
The strategy envisisioned the SuperApp as a Jetpack: a powerful tool that helps you navigate everyday life.
Developing a visual language
Alongside the definition of the SuperApp's UX principles, a visual design phase was also conducted to explore pushing the UI design towards realising our goals.
The proposed design approach looked at simplifying the visual experience as much as possible. Reducing visual noise with a softer colour palette, cleaner font and an overall more generous approach to spacing.
Contrast was used to highlight global functional elements such as search and navigation in order to highlight them on a global SuperApp layer.
To accomodate the new UI, motion principles were defined to add a further dimension to the experience.
Systemic design
An extensive audit of the current app informed the extension of the new approach into a versatile and robust toolkit. All components and modules were created as scalable and re-usable elements in Figma while extensive guidelines and foundational elements laid the groundwork for all future design work.
The outcome
Taking a hollistic look at the super app experience allowed the definition of a new vision for the Careem experience. While the refreshed UI design and toolkit formed the building blocks to reach this vision and Careem towards realising it's ambitions for the SuperApp.
