Designing the way people shop, earn, and save.
TLDR: As Tabby’s first designer, I laid the foundations for the design language and built a team of 14 designers, writers and researchers. I helped drive the company’s growth, with the app reaching 14 million users, 40,000 global brands including SHEIN, Amazon, Noon, IKEA, etc., and achieving unicorn status 🦄
+17,000
+3 million
Daily app downloads
Active shoppers
Top 5
Shopping apps in KSA and UAE
4.5 million
Clicks to merchants
Building MENA’s Best Shopping App.
Building MENA’s Best Shopping App.
Tabby offers financial freedom by empowering users to make the most of their money and take control of their spending. Our vision was to build a shopping super app—a one-stop hub for financial flexibility that would also attract merchants eager to offer Tabby as a payment method.
4.8 ⭐
App store rating
4.7 ⭐
Play store rating
The first step when joining an early-stage start-up is a design audit with product, marketing, and engineering. It gives the team a deep understanding of what’s working and what needs improvement, as well as a clear picture of the current state of the product.
Through this exercise, there were obvious visual design improvements that we could make, but it also gave us ideas on how we can develop the app to make it the starting point of someone’s shopping journey and not just a place to track their BNPL payments. A cashback product was already in the works, which was a great segway to positioning ourselves as more than just a payments app.
Laying the design foundations
Creating an online marketplace
For Tabby’s Cashback to work, we needed our customers to start their shopping journey through the Tabby’s app. To earn cashback, the user must select the merchant from Tabby’s app and shop through that redirection link. It wasn’t too tricky, but we had to communicate this clearly to customers to ensure they earned the cashback they expected.
Here’s how we went about it:
Feature deals and brands on the homepage, not just payments
Show upcoming payments when relevant (For example, there’s an upcoming payment in a few days)
Have clear labels for Tabby’s proposition. Split in 4 vs earn cashback
Enable users to make payments using the cashback they earn
Letting users track the status of their cashback and making it easy to withdraw it
After various UX and visual design iterations, we used a simple approach highlighting the brands we work with. We used data from the existing app and kept what helped our users — upcoming payments and how much they had left to spend with Tabby. Building trust and transparency with users was essential to avoid overspending or missing payments.
With the marketplace as our starting point, we constantly tracked metrics and user behaviour to understand how people shop. It helped us shape the app and add features to the roadmap based on time, effort and impact.
We introduced the Tabby card—a seamless way to use Tabby in store, flexible payment terms, the option to delay a payment, withdrawing cashback as Amazon gift cards to remove minimum limits, etc.
We were obsessed with user behaviour
Tabby soon became one of the top payment options in the region
33%
Average increase in AOV
4.5 million
Clicks to merchants
+2.2 million
Unique monthly visitors
Shaping Tabby’s brand identity
We built a bold, aspirational, and edgy brand.
I led Tabby's rebrand alongside the Head of Marketing, conducting deep groundwork to ensure our brand’s vision was clear.
We interviewed leadership to identify the three core pillars of our brand, explore the brand’s origins, and understand the company’s aspirations. This comprehensive insight allowed us to create a powerful brief for the design agency, bringing our brand to life with a fresh logo and a refined brand identity.
One of the most iconic elements became the ‘T’ logo mark, reimagined as a currency symbol—a visual anchor for Tabby as a one-stop hub for all things money. This direction aligned perfectly with our Tabby card vision, which was in its early discovery phase, and positioned it as the primary way for people to spend their money through Tabby.
Impact
This rebrand has transformed how Tabby looks and feels, establishing it as one of the region’s most recognized brands.
Laying the foundations of Tabby’s design language has been a proud achievement, seeing it evolve and resonate with such a broad audience. Watching the brand grow and adapt has been inspiring, and it’s exciting to see how the team continues to build on this vision for future growth.
From a design team of one to a team of ten in a year.
Tabby was growing fast. With multiple products moving from discovery to build, the design team had to keep up.
We started by hiring 3 designers, split by user types; B2B, B2C and Back office. This started multiplying very fast and in less than a year we had a team of 10 designers, writers and UX researchers.
No more playing catch up
Designing a Collaborative Framework for Remote, Multi-Vertical Teams
Early on, I faced the challenge of integrating design into a tech-driven culture where teams weren’t accustomed to working with designers. We needed to shift this mindset and build a scalable, collaborative process. As our design team grew, it became essential to introduce structure without restricting creativity.
Through consultations with product, design, and development teams, I developed an adaptable process that allowed designers to work across product verticals while accommodating their styles.
To support cohesion within our fully remote team—spread across six countries—I introduced bi-weekly design critiques and monthly demo days with Product Managers.
These sessions broke down silos, fostered knowledge-sharing, and helped remote team members feel connected. I also focused on strategic hiring, identifying the right moments to add specialized roles or expand capacity as project demands evolved.
This structured yet flexible approach created a more efficient, productive environment, allowing designers and product teams to work seamlessly across projects.
The regular critiques and demo days strengthened team collaboration and helped remote designers feel part of a cohesive unit.
These initiatives contributed to a high team NPS score of 9.2, reflecting both the team’s satisfaction and the supportive environment we built.
Overall, the new process empowered the design team to scale effectively while consistently delivering value.
Impact
9.2
Team NPS score
10
Team members
6
Countries
Key Learnings and Take Aways
Adapting to a Fast-Paced Environment: Navigating the shift from being a solo designer to leading a team of 10 across six countries taught me how to stay agile, focused, and adaptable in a high-growth setting.
Strategic Product Scaling: I learned to balance ambitious ideas with practical execution, scaling down products to MVPs when needed and building them back up to realize the broader vision.
Building a Recognizable Brand: Creating one of the most recognized brands in the region was both inspiring and fulfilling, underscoring the power of brand identity in shaping market presence.
Resource Planning and Hiring: Knowing when to expand the team and plan resources effectively became essential skills, ensuring we could meet business demands without overextending capacity.
TARABUT