Manzil is completely changing the landscape when it comes to islamic finance. They recognized that the way we facilitate mortgages in Canada goes against the religious values that the muslim community must follow to properly practice their faith, thus cutting them out of the conversation and preventing them from getting ahead.

In late 2019, we partnered with Toronto based Fintech Manzil to bring their new brand to life, starting with a custom website that would help their thousands of clients access financial tools. As their sole technology provider we facilitated the design and development of their completely custom website that helps them to provide 100% halal credit cards, vehicles, and other tools to their clients. We have now also been involved in branding, content creation, and the design and development of their back office tool among other custom web applications. nts.

The process started in the creative department where we met with the Manzil team multiple times to understand their vision for their new brand and website. After narrowing down the look and feel, we got to work creating mood boards and mockups to align our collective visions. This included mapping out a lot of custom features requested by Manzil such as tools for calculating financial investment projections and tools that determined which products are best for the user.

Building a user friendly and high performing web application is not an easy task. These challenges can be almost entirely addressed by making thoughtful choices during the planning stage. For this reason, it’s important to think about the overall impression you want to leave on your users before you start making detailed decisions about how to build it. If you deliver effectively to the deeper needs of all your users – providing pleasure, engagement, and an overall emotional appeal – your application can become a central part of your user’s day-to-day lives and deliver to your business goals. Great UI design certainly makes your application visually appealing, but it goes beyond just simple aesthetics.

Our goal was to create a simple, accessible and usable user experience. This means using only a targeted, purposeful selection of copy and content, clearly outlining the user journey and ensuring all information is readily available at each step. Users don’t like slow load times and it could have real consequences for your business. You may also only get a single chance to hook a user on your product.

So, if you know that you’re building an application with a lot of content (e.g. videos), you should outline that upfront so your developers can build a more robust application to ensure performance. Likewise, be clear about any intentions you have to scale your application rapidly. You don’t want your application to slow down if it makes a splash in the market or you see periodic surges in traffic. This kind of planning for the future will ensure your initial app launch can deliver the kind of speed and performance you want for your early, often-critical, users.

These are the kinds of considerations that we took when working with Manzil. The most challenging but rewarding aspect for the creative team was developing Manzil’s new sheep mascot. The entire process took over six months as we wanted to create something that was truly unique and that Manzil and their community would love. Manzil’s calculators and background color transitions were also particularly difficult to implement. We introduced branding elements, reorganized the entire sitemap a couple times to make sure the site would look appealing to users.