Riyadh Front- Above and Beyond

5 min readJul 9, 2023

Here we are yet again with another UX design project, except this time it includes enhancing a physical experience!

About

Digitizing an experience is converting a physical feature or service into a digital form. (e.g. Online Shopping).

That’s the main purpose of this project. As Riyadh Front already has an online presence, we focused more on improving it and implementing new solutions for effortless and enjoyable visits.

What? 3 weeks to finish the project? Challenge accepted.

Team: Shatha Alyazidi , Mawdah Alghamdi , Rafal Basaqer , Nr Mog

Tools: Figma, Canva, Maze, Zoom, Slack

*This project was done as part of education requirement. It is not associated with the Riyadh Front business.

Research

Riyadh Front (RF) is a living hub in the heart of Riyadh city. It’s a place that “re-imagines how we work, play, dine, and shop”. Its strategic location near King Khalid International Airport makes it a great spot for shopping and dining before flights.

Riyadh Front Shopping Area- from RF Profile

For this project we focused on families and individuals who have been to RF before. The goal was to identify their reasons to visit Riyadh Front and to know about their experiences there. Therefore as a team, we decided to conduct user interviews and pay RF Shopping Area a visit to observe how people interact with the place.

Let’s talk business now..

To ensure Riyadh Front gains competitive edge over rivals, six similar businesses were chosen -based on their online presence as a digital experience- as references for the best features to be included in our solution. And they are:

Mall of Arabia
King Khalid International Airport
Dubai Mall
City Walk (Dubai)
Doha Festival City
Bicester Village

The best competitors were:

Doha Festival City: because they have an amazing guide map.
Dubai Mall: because their website’s features and organization are great.

Our recommendations for Riyadh Front based on competitors analysis and user research:

Design a deatailed visual map of the place
Design a simple website layout

Synthesize

After conducting user interviews, the affinity map was developed to showcase the common findings between users.

Affinity Map (click on picture for clear view)

Key insights:

Users usually visit Riyadh Front to dine
Most users rely on their phones to navigate through the place
Users hate when the parking lot is packed and unmarked
Most users face difficulties to find places(restaurants/stores/facilities) easily
Users would prefer to have a visual map of Riyadh Front
Users would prefer to be able to reserve tables at restaurants

As for second method, 3 groups were the target of our observations.

Key findings:

Most users ask about directions to facilities
Front gates 1,2,3 are most crowded
Parking area for front gates are the most packed
Visitors ask employees and security about directions to restaurants and cafes

Based on the user research findings, we were able to create our persona.

Meet Jumana, the star of the show.

So, what’s Jumana’s problem with Riyadh Front?

Want to really know how she feels about RF?

Here’s how her visits to Riyadh Front look like:

Solution

To tackle the issue of Jumana, we came up with the decision to design a mobile website for the following reasons:

She uses her phone for everything (mobility)
No native-app features are needed
Jumana visits Riyadh Front on monthly basis

What are we solving and how?

3 Main Problems(bold) and their solutions(under text)

What will the website include?

Feature List Using ‘Now, Next, Later’ Method

The Next and Later lists are great features which implemented by the competitors. However, we focused on the Now list as it’s enough to solve the current concerns.

Before designing the final product, we wanted feedback on the initial one. The following user flow was used to design the wireframes (under user flow image) for testing.