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The challenge

Ummah is challenging the norms of society. They are the leading Muslim app in today's world. The purpose was simple: to make it colossal.

There was a need for adding a platform that is absent in the world and did a good job of it.

In an overflowing, the market was our first challenge to give this work-hard/play-hard team a stand-out makeover. Our real challenge was getting everything they offered in one place, designing and developing a fluid product that speaks to the users.

We helped Ummah tell the story and grow to be the leading Islamic Community platform.

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Our approach

Every bit and pixel was managed throughout a considerable long timesheet. With our team of experts, collaborating was no issue. It took all we have, every member of our team took it upon themselves to bring on the details of this large platform.

Meeting after meeting, we got right on track. Not only did we create a mega digital system to manage the content created, but we elevated it to a refreshing ambitious platform that was growing rapidly.

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Branding

With concept rounds blessed by the customer, we kicked off the research.

Since the beginning, the name of the company and the platform was meant to represent a part of the Muslim spirit, so yeah, Ummah sounded about right. The word means a united community, bound by the ties of an outstanding religion. Bearing this in mind, we decided the brand to represent the purpose and the word. The visual refinement had begun. From the logo to the little sticky notes, we strayed far and wide.

The new brand voice and tone, colors, typography, iconography, mark, and UI/UX design came from the team of Muslim experts in the field.

We designed the mark. We wanted the logo to go smoothly with the lines and make close shapes representing the meaning of Ummah. The letter ‘U’ goes perfectly with the hidden messages and belongs to the logo.

Closer, together and united in halal terms.

Also, the logo represents everything that you can do inside the app. A hidden message is the shopping bag which indicates that inside the app there is a halal shopping place. This logo stands for the moral values of Islam, of course, the simplicity and humility of the clothes and gadgets around a Muslim life. You can also see the infinity sign which is cooperative with the shopping bag and the letter U.
Wide Infinite variety of choices and an expanding community.

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Type Design

Based on the custom-made mark, we wanted to create a unique single weight font for Ummah to be utilized on all branding applications. We went Circular. A dominant font that was customized for the brand. Well balanced for the developer framework but also adjusted to proportional widths.

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Motion & Videography

Our motion design work and brand awareness become crucial when explaining and dropping new features. It has become a must-do part of the brand.

Showing our initial thoughts and the process of how a mark its formed, how a page is created or how important is that one button at the end of the page, it’s worth taking some time to bring together.

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Content Strategy & UI/UX Design

The content strategy must have been one of the first things we set down to discuss. How the information will be led to the customer, if it should be friendly or dictated to them, defining a target audience, keywords and just everything in one word.

We started to construct some content around the brand. Researching the product and the community which might be using it, we found out that the users are people with real problems and feelings, needing a ‘friend’ that helps them stay on the right path.

Understanding that Ummah is an Islamic product, we focused on the ‘halal’ (permissible) terms. Good halal pictures, permissible music, and good generated content. The platform in which all this content is showed… mind-blowing. In a world full of over-explanation of features and creations, designing a simple but powerful content was essential. From content strategy to wireframes to the design page, simplicity was the key factor.  

Ummah is a large platform with an ever-growing number of users, with an urgent need to think and structure to presenting the information. We wanted to do something no one has done before in these kinds of apps. We started the wireframe design, and because of the large number of content, we decided to design an app that feels light, airy and simply elegant, relying heavily on whitespace, readability and information hierarchy.

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Development

Nothing would matter if we didn't have an ace developing team.

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To handle this heavy platform behind the scenes, make it work like a charm and feel like a 21st-century platform was possible only by using the most proven tech stack like Amazon Web Services(AWS) combining with tons of other pieces from G-Firebase & Google Cloud Platform as a Cloud trunk, not forgetting APIs & Microservices, Lambdas, RDS & NoSQL Databases, CDN, Dockers and many more, on the other side: .Net-Core as a core language following it with Asp.Net, NodeJs, Python, Angular, PHP,...etc. While for the main front for iOS and Android the most proper way was to go native: iOS - Swift, Android - Kotlin.

All of this was realized using the right product development tools(CircleCI, User testing & DevOps tools) and proven methodologies(Design thinking, Agile development & Digital-first strategy).

It took time to build this cool digital giant from scratch. Now that we see the final product, absolutely worth it.

Now Ummah is one of the most amazing Muslim digital platforms when it comes to e-commerce & marketplace, and getting all the daily needful information and knowledge.

So, we at AZWEDO are proud to have been part of Ummah definement and growth over time.

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