Project Overview

Easy Padel is a UAE-based platform for booking padel courts — connecting players with clubs, coaches, and courts across the country. By the time I joined, the product had a live mobile app and a growing network of clubs, but the design had been built under deadline pressure and was showing its limits. I was the sole product designer across the mobile app, web booking experience, and marketing surfaces.

Mobile App Redesign Challenge

The mobile app was falling behind the website in terms of clarity and usefulness. Getting to a specific club required going through event pages or initiating a booking — there was no direct path. Tournament registration pushed users out to the website entirely. Games showed up on the home screen but without a clear structure around them. The app felt like a narrowed-down version of the product rather than a native mobile experience.

Research

I started with team alignment, then ran interviews with seven players across skill levels in Dubai. The patterns were consistent: nobody realized events were stored in their profile — 'Upcoming Events' confused more than it helped. Coaches were almost universally found through WhatsApp recommendations, not through the app. And when it came to the home screen, users were unanimous: they wanted everything visible upfront, without hunting through tabs.

Key Insights

The app's structure reflected how the team thought about the product — not how users actually moved through it. One participant spent two minutes looking for coaches before giving up: 'I just ask on WhatsApp.' Another didn't know tournaments were in the app at all. The fix wasn't just visual: it required rethinking what lived on the first screen and what everything was called.

Experiment

Two directions went into prototyping. In the first, I grouped clubs, coaches, and tournaments inside a Discover tab, leaving the home screen focused on Fast Booking and a games feed. In the second, I removed the tab concept entirely — each key section got its own colored banner on the main screen, with Fast Booking staying as the primary action. Both prototypes went back to the same seven users for testing.

Experiment Results

The second prototype was the clear winner. Having everything on one screen removed the friction of navigating between tabs — users didn't have to guess where things lived. The Discover tab in the first prototype consistently tripped people up: they couldn't predict what was behind it without tapping. The banners communicated their content at a glance. I also used this as an opportunity to clean up the profile section — 'Upcoming Events' became 'My Events', and coach cards got a visual pass with clearer hierarchy and level-specific buttons.

Impact

The redesign shipped and held up. The tile layout with colored sections became the new baseline for the home screen — structured enough to be clear, flexible enough to grow with the platform. The numbers confirmed what the usability tests had already suggested.

Fast Booking & Search Flow

The fast booking modal worked fine with two clubs. With six on the platform — including a new one with two court types — it became overloaded. Empty results were common because availability was hard-locked to a specific date and club.

The fix

Exit interviews after failed searches kept pointing to the same issue: availability was locked to a specific date and club before users even saw results. I simplified the interface, introduced court type selection, and decoupled results from those hard constraints. Club and trainer cards got a redesign to carry more meaningful information as the product moved toward a proper search experience. The updated flow was then adapted for the mobile app — same logic, adjusted for a smaller screen.

Impact

Decoupling availability from strict date and club constraints had the most direct effect — empty search results were the main reason users dropped off before the redesign. Simplifying the modal and redesigning the cards removed friction at every step of the flow.

Landing Page System

The marketing team needed six landing pages in two weeks while the design team was at capacity. All six landed on me.

The approach

I mapped all six briefs against each other before touching Figma. They shared the same structural patterns — Hero, Feature Grid, Testimonials, CTA — with surface-level variation. I built each pattern as a named Figma component with defined properties and variants, documented well enough that developers could build without follow-up questions. Once the system was in place, assembling each page was a matter of swapping content into slots.

Impact

Six pages shipped ahead of deadline with no revision cycles — the marketing team assembled directly with developers, no designer in the loop after handoff.