Ruba: A Journey to Simplified Education Finance

Ruba started with a mission: to simplify the lives of parents and students by streamlining education finance and finding the right educational institutions.

Ruba faced a critical challenge: empowering parents and individuals to navigate the complex world of education financing while providing a seamless user experience. Users were grappling with repetitive data entry, limited payment options, and difficulty finding the right institution.

To address these challenges, we embarked on a deep dive into the user's world. Through usability audits, we uncovered pain points in the existing design. Market research shed light on competitive offerings, and surveys provided invaluable insights into user needs and preferences. By creating detailed user personas, we gained a profound understanding of our target audience.

We began with a thorough usability audit of Ruba's existing designs. This process involved identifying pain points and areas for improvement to create a more intuitive and user-friendly experience. The audit provided valuable insights that guided our subsequent design decisions and helped us prioritize key features.

We conducted extensive market research to understand the landscape and identify what competitors were doing well and where they fell short. For more details, you can refer to my Medium article on conducting a comprehensive competitive audit. A feature comparison table was created to benchmark Ruba against competitors. This exercise highlighted gaps in our current offerings and helped prioritize features that would provide the most value to users.

To ensure we focused on the most impactful improvements, we used a detailed feature prioritization process. This involved scoring each feature based on Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability. For a deeper understanding of this method, you can refer to my Medium article on the Kano Model.

To truly hear directly from our users, we conducted surveys in both English and Arabic. These surveys explored their needs, preferences, frustrations, and reasons for seeking financing. The insights we gathered were pivotal in shaping Ruba’s product strategy, ensuring that our solutions were aligned with what users really needed. If you’d like to see the questions that guided our strategic decisions, you can view the surveys directly through the links provided below.

Building on the rich insights from our surveys, we created detailed personas—fictional characters that represent key user groups. While these personas are not real individuals, they are grounded in the data we collected, making them powerful tools for guiding our decisions. Whenever we design a feature or make a strategic choice, we ask, "Will this make our personas' lives easier?" and "Does this solve their biggest pain points?" By keeping these personas at the center of our strategy, we’re crafting an educational financing experience that truly meets users' real needs.

The journey with Ruba was truly transformative. Through a deep dive into user insights, we were able to shape the platform's direction to meet real user needs. Our user-centered design approach resulted in significantly improved user satisfaction and reduced user frustration.

Design is not a destination—it’s an ongoing, iterative process. This project laid a strong foundation for future growth. I’m excited to see where Ruba goes next and look forward to continuing my work on innovative design solutions.