Designing for a culture we don’t live in.
What the ministry was really asking for
On paper the brief was an employee app: an ID, a calendar, training, leave requests. Underneath it was a harder question. A ministry building is also a public place. Citizens walk in all day, there is no turnstile that only staff pass through, and a visitor badge looks much like an employee one. The ministry needed to know, reliably and without friction, that an employee is at their desk, and it wanted the same app to make working there feel looked after rather than policed.
I spent four years leading design on government products in MENA, most of them under NDA. This case is not about one ministry. It is a showcase of what that work taught us: in this region the answer to a brief is rarely in the brief, and getting the culture wrong undoes everything a good interface does right.
Culture is one of the forces that drive how people behave.
A product that ignores it can be flawless on paper and still feel foreign in the hand. So the first weeks went into understanding rather than drawing, and the list grew long: Arabic as the base layout, staff who are both locals and foreign specialists, a working day shaped by prayer and the weekend, colleagues who keep their faces covered, hard sun on a phone screen, Android as often as iPhone, and research that has to go through local product owners because an outside team does not interview employees directly. Six of these changed the product the most.
Right to left, in small examples
Mirroring a layout takes an afternoon. What takes longer is the detail underneath it: type that has no capitals, icons that carry a direction, numbers that refuse to turn around. These are the ones we kept coming back to.
Arabic has no capital letters, so an uppercase label has no Arabic equivalent. Emphasis comes from size and weight instead, and because Arabic sits smaller at the same point size, it goes up a step to read as equal.
Anything that carries a direction flips: an arrow, the paper plane of Send, a person moving forward in a wheelchair. Anything that doesn’t, like a clock, a check or a phone, stays as it is.
Lines start on the right and break there too. Letter-spacing pulls apart joined letters, so Arabic gets none.
Digits and Latin letters keep their own direction inside an Arabic line, so every ID, time and code has to be checked in context, not in the string table.
Avatar, text and chevron change sides together, and the chevron points the other way.
Time runs right to left as well: progress bars, step indicators and timelines all start on the right.
Home: the one thing you need most, already open
We asked what an employee actually needs from this app ten times a day, and the answer was never the calendar. It was proof of who you are, for a guard at a door, a reader at a gate, a colleague at a counter. So the home screen is the ID itself: photo, name, a barcode a scanner can read straight off the glass, and the countdown to the next check-in, so nobody is caught out by it. Everything else earns its place below as a notification, and each type gets its own colour so that a leave decision is never mistaken for a course reminder.
Light and dark, because of the sun
Check-in happens at the entrance, in midday light that washes out most screens. Inside, the same phone is read in a dim corridor. A single theme cannot serve both, so the app has two, one tap apart in the header, and every text and colour pair in both meets WCAG AA or better. This is not a styling choice. It is the difference between an employee checking in on the first try and standing in the sun shading the screen with a hand. The rest of this page shows the light theme.
Learning: a career you can see
The ministry invests in its people and wants them to feel it. Mandatory courses, certificates and a visible development path tell an employee where they are going, not just what they must finish this month. The design makes that path legible: a course opens with its real cost in time, the list shows what is done, what is next and what is left, and the certificate is one tap away. The goal was that nobody has to open a course to find out where they stopped, and everybody can see the road ahead.
The badge
Face ID was the obvious answer and the wrong one. Some women keep their faces covered at work, some employees share a phone with family, and a government system cannot depend on a camera that a quarter of its users will not use. GPS alone proves nothing in a building open to the public. A badge does: it is already how staff are recognised, it works with the phone or without it, and it is the same gesture for everyone. So the badge became the primary key, the phone the reader, and the face and a code the alternatives. The card itself was part of the work: a front that reads from across a room, a back in Arabic only, with nothing a guard does not need.
Check-in: present, without being watched
The ministry needs to know an employee is at work. The employee should not feel tracked. We kept the two apart: the phone only ever asks once it already knows you are in Block B, the check-in is a gesture you make rather than a signal you emit, and there is no button to press afterwards. The tick appears where the badge icon was and the screen closes itself. One notification, one tap of the badge, done, and the quiet times settings below decide when the app is allowed to ask at all.
- Notification
- Hold the badge
- Done
Quiet times: the app knows when not to speak
An app that buzzes during prayer, or on Eid, or at nine in the evening, tells its users that it was built somewhere else. Here the local rhythm is a first-class setting, not a workaround: prayer reminders with today’s times, silence on religious and national holidays, nothing after working hours unless it is urgent, and a morning check-in reminder the employee can switch off. Respect, in this product, is a notification that does not arrive.
