BAHREIN
Digital City Bahrain is a next-generation smart urban development that brings together residential, corporate, commercial and innovation spaces within a fully digital ecosystem.
In this project, I work as UX & Service Designer, defining the end-to-end user experience of the city: from creating the core service design frameworks (smart parking, urban services, tenant, visitors..) to designing a unified smart city app that centralises all digital interactions between users and the city.
The goal is to build a coherent, efficient and scalable experience that connects physical spaces, digital platforms and technological infrastructure under a single, user-centred smart city vision.
TYPE
UX/UI
SERVICE DESIGN
TIMELINE
12 MONTH
YEAR
2025
CONTENT
APP DESIGN
SERVICE DESIGN
UX STRATEGY
CHALLENGE
Designing the digital experience of a smart city means dealing with a highly complex system made up of multiple services, stakeholders and user profiles.
The main challenges were:
- Creating a unified experience across a city composed of independent yet interconnected services.
- Defining service frameworks that worked both strategically and operationally.
- Connecting physical experiences (spaces, access, mobility) with digital platforms and smart infrastructure.
- Designing for very different user types: residents, workers, visitors, operators and city managers.
- Laying solid UX foundations that could scale and evolve over time.
DEVELOPMENT
The project followed a Service Design–led UX approach, starting from a city-wide perspective rather than isolated features or screens.
We began with an in-depth analysis of the Digital City Bahrain ecosystem, identifying key services, touchpoints and user interactions. Based on this, we defined user journeys for each main user type and usage context, mapping how people move through the city and interact with its services over time.
To translate these journeys into actionable systems, we created service blueprints and experience frameworks for the city’s core pillars, including:
- Smart parking and mobility
- Urban and community services
- Tenant and visitor management
- Communication and notification systems
These frameworks allowed us to align frontstage user experiences with backstage processes, systems and data flows, ensuring consistency across the entire ecosystem.
SOLUTION
The outcome of the project is a structured, scalable definition of Digital City Bahrain’s digital experience at both strategic and product levels.
At a strategic level, we delivered a set of experience and service frameworks that define how the city’s services work together as a single system. These frameworks act as a long-term foundation for design, development and operational decisions.
At a product level, we designed the UX concept and structure of a unified smart city app, conceived as the main digital entry point to the city. Through this app, users can access and manage services.
The app is designed to hide complexity behind the scenes, offering users a simple, consistent and intuitive experience regardless of the service they are using.
IMPACT
This work helped establish a clear and shared vision of the Digital City Bahrain experience across stakeholders.
By defining experience and service frameworks early in the process, we reduced ambiguity, aligned technical and business teams and created a strong foundation for scalable digital implementation. The project ensures that the city’s smart capabilities are not only technologically advanced, but also usable, understandable and genuinely valuable for the people who live, work and visit the city.
The result is a city experience designed to feel connected, efficient and human-centred—where complexity is managed by the system, not the user.
