Challenge

In the UAE, drinking water is a daily necessity, yet the buying experience remained surprisingly inconvenient. Users relied on supermarkets, phone calls to local suppliers, or generic grocery apps that treated water as a secondary product. This led to recurring issues—heavy lifting, missed deliveries, unclear pricing, lack of recurring orders, and last-minute water shortages at homes and offices. Existing solutions failed to address the repetitive nature of water consumption or the urgency and reliability users expected from a utility-like service.

The core challenge was to design a specialized e-commerce experience that treated water not as a one-time purchase, but as an essential, recurring need—while building trust, speed, and affordability into every interaction.

Key Design Decisions

I designed Lifey as a task-first, low-friction mobile experience focused on speed and certainty. The product flow was intentionally minimal: select water → choose delivery time & frequency → checkout. Instead of overwhelming users with browsing-heavy grocery patterns, Lifey prioritizes offers, brands, and delivery preferences upfront, acknowledging that most users already know what they want.

A critical UX decision was introducing auto-delivery and recurring scheduling as a core feature rather than an add-on. This removed the mental burden of remembering to reorder water and positioned Lifey as a dependable utility service. Payment flows were optimized for fast checkout with no coupons, no top-ups, and no hidden conditions—reinforcing transparency and trust in a price-sensitive market like the UAE.

Brand trust was embedded directly into the UI by highlighting well-known regional water brands (Masafi, Al Ain, Mai Dubai, Oasis, Nestlé, etc.), while location relevance (Dubai & Abu Dhabi) and fast, free delivery messaging were surfaced early to reduce hesitation.