talabat Design Showcase: Making design visible and accessible to all

We all know the famous quote “Good design is good business” sent by T. J. Watson Jr., in a 1966 memo to all of IBM. We’ve come a long way since then and most of us are convinced that Design has strategic value, it has an amplifier effect.

Now, are we REALLY convinced?

We yet witness in many large organisations, Design struggling to find a seat at the table. It’s been talked about so much that it has become a cliché to say that. I believe, as design leaders, we still have a long way to go in positioning Design as an equal strategic partner to Business and Tech.

How did we not manage to do that already?

Friends, here in design, we could be a lil bit of a hermit at times. Don’t we :)

It is my belief that for Design to prove its value, it has to be accessible and visible to all. Our cross-functional peers need to understand how we work, what goes on behind those designs, the rigour we put into it and how it impacts the bottom line. Basically, remove the mystery around Design.

Therefore, when I established the four pillars of DesignOps in talabat, in 2020, one of those pillars was ‘Spotlight’. Under this pillar, we established ways to communicate Design’s impact and educate others on the role and value of design and research.

In this post, I’m going to share with you the most exciting story of how our design team evangelises the value of Design in talabat, by hosting an open showcase of their work, every month.

talabat Design Showcase

In talabat, the idea of having a design showcase was born out of a real need. People outside Design didn’t really know what the design team were working on and what really went on behind-the-scenes of a polished design solution. This not only meant we couldn’t get early feedback from our stakeholders (unless there was a 2 hours long meeting for that 🙄) but also faced a lack of empathy towards our process.

We wanted to bridge this gap and make design accessible to all — and do so in a real engaging way.

The talabat Design Showcase was born.

We ran a workshop to understand our challenges better, define our goals and design an event that would help us make Design visible in the org.

Planning and Hype

Every successful event requires meticulous planning and executing. Our Ops team, with the help of the entire design team, does a fantastic job at not only planning all the details, from curating each and every exhibit carefully, and building a hype around it — fully engaging the audience leading to the day.

We advertise it like a real event, with posters, email and Slack reminders. We send out a nicely designed company-wide invite to come and witness the outstanding work of our rockstars.

The Showcase

This is the spotlight moment for our design team. With on-going discoveries, user journeys, uncooked designs, prototypes, and videos, we showcase the full breadth and depth of our design process and reveal some incredibly inspiring behind-the-scenes.

One of the great successes of our showcase has been the Research exhibit where you could experience the journey of a research participant, from being recruited through our user research community ‘Food Court’ to participating in an actual moderated usability test and finally receiving a reward.

We had lots of other interesting exhibits, including a live audit of Arabic in our app, journey of an undecided discoverer, the ordering experience at Expo, groceries experience, finding, ordering and tracking orders, Fintech, UX content and many many more.

Impact

The raw and interactive nature of this showcase makes it truly unique and something that everyone looks forward to attending. The showcase opened the doors of our design world to the entire org, and brought visibility and appreciation to our work — which does wonders to our team’s morale.

This event has proved to be a powerful tool to not only evangelise the value of design in talabat but also cultivate a design-driven culture in the company.

Special Thanks to

• Our ResearchOps Specialist — Farida Abdulaziz for curating and organising an outstanding design showcase
• Our Design Director — Asmita Kunwar for rallying not only the design team but the entire company to come together and celebrate the impact Design is making in talabat
• Each and every rockstar in our design team, for planning and putting up a great show

Thanks to everyone who attended and encouraged us with their feedback and participation. We look forward to another great one, next month.

We are Hiring

If you’re passionate about design, as much as we are, and exploring a new opportunity — WE ARE HIRING. Come join us and become a part of a team that’s building a ‘world-class’ ordering experience in the MENA region.