UX Designer · In-House Contract · 80 Hours
Key Result
16 → 5 min in testing
Speed
80 Hours
Type
Intranet + Design System
Client
Al Bayader
A company that outgrew its tools
Al Bayader's work had spread across three systems that didn't talk to each other. Doing one ordinary thing meant opening all three and putting the pieces back together yourself.
The VP of SC Procurement brought me in to design one intranet that could replace all of it. Eighty hours to do it in.
20 interviews. One diagnosis.
I interviewed 20 employees and walked through their actual daily workflows observing where they went when they needed information and where they got stuck.
This wasn't a survey. Watching someone work turns up friction they'd never think to write down, because by then it's just how the job goes.
"Critical information for daily tasks was scattered across several apps, creating daily frustration that led to miscommunications and delays."
Synthesis from 20 employee interviews, and five of them timed on their start-of-day routine
Where the work lived
Three systems, none of them talking to each other
Where the work lived 01
Monday.com
Tasks were assigned and tracked here, which worked until you needed the file or the conversation attached to one. Neither of those lived in the same place as the task.
Where the work lived 02
Team conversations, and file transfer. A company was moving working documents through a consumer messaging app. There's no version history in a WhatsApp thread, and once it scrolls the file is gone.
Where the work lived 03
The intranet they already had
Meant to solve exactly this. It was hard to navigate and the resources were buried, so by the time I arrived people had added it to the list of places to check instead of using it.
Eighty hours, no wasted motion
Discovery
Contextual interviews with twenty employees, watching real daily workflows rather than asking which features they wanted. The root cause was that the information already existed, it was just spread across three places.
Info Arch.
Designed one navigation structure covering every key information type, so employees can find anything from a single starting point.
Comms Hub
Integrated API connections to pull updates and discussions into one place, so nobody has to check three apps for a status.
Layout
A modular, team-editable layout system, so teams update their own sections without needing design or dev support.
Blog / Culture
A bilingual English and Arabic company blog. It gave Al Bayader a digital culture layer and a company voice for the first time.
Design System
A complete bilingual design system for developer handoff, so the build would match the design and could be maintained long-term.
A New, Simple Intranet
Easily accessible communication hub
Easy to update layout so teams can make it work for them.
An English/Arabic Blog
Complete with a Design System
From 16 minutes to 5
"Martín's ability to balance user needs with business goals ensured that our intranet wasn't just visually appealing but also highly functional. His work laid a strong foundation for Al Bayader's digital transformation."
Anas Yehyawi, VP of SC Procurement for Transformation, Al Bayader
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69% Faster, In Testing
From 16 minutes to 5, timed with five employees on their start-of-day routine against the designed flows. Five people on one routine is a small sample and I'd rather say that than dress it up.
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One Starting Point, Not Five
Updates, documents and discussions designed into a single hub, with API integrations pulling them in from the tools teams already used, so nobody has to check three apps for a status.
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Designed, Tested, Handed Over
Al Bayader didn't proceed to build. The design and its bilingual system were delivered in eighty hours, ready for their developers. Nothing here is a running product.
What I would do differently
Stay involved through the build. I designed for a handoff, the handoff happened, and I never found out why it stopped. Could have been budget, could have been priority, could have been something in the design that was hard to build. I still don't know.
Eighty hours doesn't buy a proper study. So I picked the one sequence every employee repeats every morning and timed five of them through it. I'd make the same call again under the same constraint, and it's still five people. A bigger sample would have told me whether those five were typical or just the five who agreed to be timed.