U GIFT, from contract to a live web in six weeks
U GIFT is a digital gift voucher platform for Jordan. You pick a store, or any partner store, choose an amount, and the gift arrives on WhatsApp. Friends can chip in to one card, and everything a person receives adds up to one balance they spend with a single QR code. It was a two-person build through Dimensions: I owned the spec, the app's design, the API, the web dashboards and the servers, and a Flutter developer built the app from my screens.
Written before any screen
Six weeks only works if nobody has to guess. These came first, before any screen was drawn.
User journeys
Seven personas, each journey with its failure paths. They doubled as the script for user acceptance testing.
App flow maps
Every screen of the app with its states and the order to build it in, so the app and the API could be built side by side.
Build plan
Ten modules mapped onto the six weeks, with the business decisions the client had to close at kickoff listed up front.
Brand system
Built on the client's own kit: licensable typefaces for web and Android, Arabic companions so Arabic never falls back to a system font, and a darker periwinkle so text passes contrast.
Screens from the app
Tap any screen to see it larger.
Decisions behind it
One engine for every report
Platform, merchant and branch totals all come from one engine, so they can't drift apart. Building it showed that group gifts never reached the merchant's own dashboard. Now there's one definition of sales, and a test that fails if two screens ever disagree.
One balance, one QR
Every voucher a person receives adds to one balance. At the counter they show a single QR, valid for two minutes and used once, with a six-character code as a backup. The server decides which vouchers pay.
Gift pages that open at once
The recipient and group pages are light server-rendered web pages, not part of the app. They open from a WhatsApp link on a phone with no app and no account, so they have to paint instantly and show a proper link preview.
Arabic first
Everything works in Arabic and English. Arabic is set in its own typefaces, never a fallback, because most senders in Jordan write in Arabic.
- NestJS
- Next.js
- Flutter
- PostgreSQL
The app screens are from the design handover and show demo stores and demo people. U GIFT and its designs belong to the client.