Careem

How it started

Careem banned me. In school my friends and I found a loophole that got us free rides, and years later when I tried to sign up as a broke graduate, my account was permanently blocked.

By then I'd done a research project for FITTR that got me an internship there. So I thought: do the same for Careem, and maybe they'll hire me.

I borrowed my brother's phone and audited the app I wasn't allowed to use.

What I did

An in-depth UX audit of the sign-up and food ordering flows — pain points identified, competitive analysis, solutions proposed.

It came out as a 39-minute read on Medium, typed by hand. This was the pre-ChatGPT era.

Read the full audit →

What I'd do differently

I found forty things and treated them as equally interesting. Most weren't.

I also wrote solutions instead of designing them — pages of this could be improved by with nothing to look at. Now I'd redesign the three screens that mattered and let those carry the argument.

Knowing which three to keep is a skill I didn't have yet.

What it led to

Careem never hired me. I reached out to their product folks on ADPList — they liked the work, they just weren't hiring juniors then.

But it got me my first ever internship, at Hala Insurance.