Yassir
A super app in two alphabets
Directing product design, research, and writing for the MENA super app: ride-hailing, last-mile delivery, and financial services across 45 cities, in Arabic and Latin scripts.
Problem
Yassir spans ride-hailing, last-mile delivery, and financial services in markets most design playbooks ignore. The product had to work in Arabic and in Latin scripts, right to left and left to right, for users whose devices and connectivity rarely match the assumptions Western patterns bake in, including millions who have no bank account at all, for whom the app's financial layer is the first formal financial service they've used. And the UX organisation had to keep growing through a $150M Series B, the largest in the region at the time, without losing craft.
Outcome
A multidisciplinary UX org of designers, researchers, and writers across three continents, with managers managed across Product Design, UX Research, and UX Writing. SEFAR, the design system, made right-to-left support a foundation rather than an afterthought: componentised Latin and Arabic typography, accessible functional colour and spacing tokens, and a Figma to Lokalise to GitHub localisation pipeline. Research became a horizontal function that tested assumptions before they shipped.
Snapshot
- Client
- Yassir
- Years
- 2022-2024
- Markets
- 45 cities
- Series B
- $150M
- Team
- 32+ members
- RTL support
- Built in
Context
Three businesses in one product
A super app is not one product, it is several products wearing one interface: a ride-hailing service, a delivery network, and a financial layer, each with its own risks and rhythms, sharing a single home screen. Yassir ran that product in 45 cities through a phase of intense growth. The design question was never just how a screen should look. It was how one product language could hold businesses that behave nothing alike, in markets that global patterns quietly assume away.
System
SEFAR reads right to left
SEFAR, the design system, treated Arabic as a first-class script rather than a translation target. Typography was componentised for Latin and Arabic together, colour and spacing tokens were built functional and accessible from the start, and a Figma to Lokalise to GitHub pipeline kept localisation continuous instead of a release-day scramble. When right-to-left is a foundation, mirrored layouts, bidirectional text, and numerals stop being bug reports and become properties of the system. And SEFAR was never only components. A rich illustration system carried visual storytelling across markets, and a content system made UX writing (in English, French and Arabic) a governed part of the design language, with localised copy flowing through the same pipeline as the interface it lives in.
Team
Managing managers across three continents
The org grew to 32+ designers, researchers, and writers spread across three continents, with managers leading each craft. UX Research was established as a horizontal function serving every vertical, and UX Writing was built up from its foundations. The harder, quieter work was cultural: bridging market differences without flattening them, and embedding continuous research so the team tested its assumptions instead of importing them.
Dimi's real legacy is the empowered team and the new standard they set.