NEOS 1

TL;DR: Total redesign of NEOS 1 - A community services ‘superapp’ dedicated to supporting the lives of the citizens of NEOM, a new cognitive city under construction in the Middle East.

Context

NEOM is a next-generation cognitive city being built in the Middle East, and Nortal is playing a key part in delivering software to support millions of citizens from around the world in their new home and workplace.

NEOS 1 is the everyday app for life at NEOM. It is the very first live application available at NEOM, and allows citizens to use and enjoy all of the services available to them and discover everything they need to know about their new community.

Problem

The initial app was designed, built, and launched quickly - to satisfy an urgent need. However, the reception to the app from stakeholders and users alike was unfavorable due to a confusing UX and IA, as well as below-par visual and UI design.

Nortal decided to form a new team to redesign NEOS 1. I was hired as the Product Design Lead and was supported by another senior Product/Service Designer and 2 Product Managers. The new app still needed to solve the user problems that the first one did, but with huge improvements in the execution and further exploration into our user's behavior and attitudes.

🚀 As we formed our design principles, it became apparent that ‘Designing for scale’ would be perhaps the most important principle to keep in mind. In a constantly growing community, the number of available services and types of users are also constantly shifting and expanding - so the framework of our app needed to be designed in a way that would scale with the city.

Research

As a team, we routinely conducted remote user interviews with real people on the ground at NEOM. The interview questions themselves are constantly changing in order to better understand our users and the unique experience they are going through, their motivations, goals, frustrations and pain points.

As well as users, we also needed to align with business stakeholders and their vision for the product. Being in the unique position of the first and only live application at NEOM, our app already has the entire market share and is deemed essential to all new joiners. The long-term vision for NEOS 1 was to leverage it's position to grow into a ‘superapp’ that could serve all citizens of NEOM with their day-to-day needs. From food delivery, to transport, and recreational activities. A single gateway to the world's first cognitive city.

As a lot of these services have industry-leading user experiences already (Uber, Deliveroo, etc.) we conducted extensive benchmarking to better determine where we could follow best practice patterns, while still maintaining consistency across our application.

Ideate & Iterate

To get us off to a flying start, we planned and conducted a week-long ‘Google’ Design Sprint in Miro that resulted in a Figma prototype of a core problem we intended to solve. This prototype acted as the catalyst for the designs to grow from.

A thorough audit of the requirements was undertaken and a new information architecture was designed to accommodate what we needed right now, as well as what was coming in the future. This was completed and communicated via IA diagrams, service maps, user flows, and various other deliverables that were the outcomes of design thinking style workshops.

These deliverables were instrumental in being able to see the bigger picture of the app, while still designing and testing smaller sections and features. We conducted usability tests remotely with real users and made changes accordingly.

🤝 A Figma-based design system was concurrently designed and maintained by a separate team. This was instrumental in us being able to design consistent UI at pace. We contributed to this design system frequently and were seen as the gold standard in how to use the design system across the account.

Refine & Deliver

To better communicate with the product and development teams, we created a file structure and naming convention within Figma that makes the status of designs clear for all that are involved. Nothing moves to ‘Final’ unless annotated, discussed, and understood across teams, with relevant documentation created.

That’s not to say we weren’t as lean and agile as possible. During delivery, we communicated closely with the development team and solved edge cases whenever they inevitably arose. We regularly checked builds and acted as design QA.

Results

• Improved Satisfaction Scores - Our beta tests and follow-up surveys showed significant improvements in user satisfaction over the initial version of the app.
• Stakeholder Approval - NEOM is an ambitious and dynamic project with people and visions constantly evolving. Getting and keeping stakeholders onboard from concept through to delivery has been a huge success that others have struggled with managing..
• Opportunities and Trust - Nortal continues to work on numerous other projects for NEOM as a result of successfully shipping NEOS 1.