Hamdan Awards

The Hamdan Awards ecosystem supports more than 5,000 applicants, judges, committees, and administrators. The work connected three products: a public foundation website, an applicant portal, and an internal awards management platform.

The core objective was to make a complex, multi-stage awards process easier to understand and operate without reducing the flexibility required by different award categories, user roles, evaluation stages, and languages.

The existing experience was fragmented across discovery, application, review, and administration. Applicants needed clearer guidance, while internal teams needed a dependable way to coordinate a process shaped by many roles and rules.

The solution organized the experience around three connected products. Each product serves a distinct moment, but they share one journey from awareness to application, evaluation, and outcome.

1. DiscoverFind the relevant award and understand its requirements.
2. Check eligibilityConfirm the opportunity is a good fit before starting.
3. ApplyComplete the guided form and provide supporting evidence.
4. ReviewVerify that the submission is complete and ready.
5. EvaluateAssess the application against the defined criteria.
6. DecideFinalize results through the appropriate committees.
7. NotifyCommunicate the outcome and relevant next steps.

The applicant portal had to communicate complex requirements without overwhelming users. The redesigned structure moves from award discovery and eligibility into a clear application sequence, making requirements, progress, and outstanding work visible.

Application experience

Long requirements were divided into manageable steps. Contextual guidance appears where decisions are made, validation happens early, and evidence requirements are explained before upload. This reduces uncertainty and helps applicants prepare complete submissions.

Applicant dashboard

The dashboard became the applicant’s source of truth: active awards, deadlines, current status, and the next useful action are visible without searching across pages.

Selected product decisions

• Expose award categories and their distinctions early so applicants can make a confident choice before starting.
• Place eligibility confirmation at the beginning of the flow to prevent avoidable effort and incomplete submissions.
• Turn requirements into a staged checklist with visible completion rather than one long, undifferentiated form.
• Explain evidence formats and limits beside upload actions, with clear progress and validation feedback.
• Keep help and guidance connected to the current task instead of sending applicants away to search documentation.

Applicant outcome

After launch, submission performance increased by 1,352%. A satisfaction survey collected 257 responses and recorded more than 80% CSAT. These measures indicate that the redesigned experience helped more people move through the process successfully and with greater confidence.

The internal platform coordinates a high-volume process across administrators, committee managers, team leads, and judges. Instead of forcing every user through the same interface, navigation, actions, and information are shaped by responsibility and stage.

Key design decisions

• Role-based navigation keeps the interface relevant while protecting access boundaries.
• Persistent status and clear next actions reduce reliance on memory and external coordination.
• Filters, saved context, and dense-but-readable tables support repeated operational work.
• Evaluation criteria are grouped and sequenced to help judges focus without losing context.

Designing for operational scale

The management platform had to support repeated work across award cycles while keeping the state of each application understandable. The solution treated status as a shared language across tables, detail views, assignments, evaluations, and committee work.

For administrators, the priority was oversight and configuration. For committee managers and team leads, it was coordination: knowing which applications were ready, who was responsible, and where attention was needed. For judges, the priority was focused evaluation with enough context to make a decision without carrying the full complexity of the operational system.

Evaluation experience

Evaluation was structured around a predictable sequence: identify the assigned application, understand its context, review submitted evidence, apply the relevant criteria, save progress, and complete the decision. The interface preserved context between these steps so judges did not have to reconstruct their place after every action.

Testing with 20 users produced an 82% task-success rate. In a focused benchmark, six of eight participants completed their tasks within the target time. Post-launch reporting also recorded a 21% reduction in bounce rate and approximately 71% average scroll depth.

A shared design system aligned the public website, applicant portal, and awards management product. Reusable foundations and patterns made the experience more coherent and gave design and engineering a common language.

The system was organized around the behavior shared across products rather than attempting to make every screen look identical. Forms, tables, status, filters, uploads, navigation, feedback, and empty states could be reused while still adapting to a public page, a guided applicant task, or a dense operational workspace.

• Shared typography, spacing, color, elevation, and interaction states.
• Reusable form, table, filter, status, upload, navigation, and feedback patterns.
• Variants for different product contexts without fragmenting the core system.
• Documentation and handoff guidance to support implementation consistency.

RTL and LTR by design

Arabic and English were treated as equal product experiences. Direction, alignment, icon behavior, data density, and component composition were reviewed in both reading directions rather than mirrored at the end.

This approach also improved handoff. Shared names, states, and variants made it easier for design and engineering to discuss behavior, identify missing cases, and keep implementation consistent as the three products evolved.

The foundation website was an important part of the ecosystem, not a separate marketing surface. Its role was to explain the foundation and its awards, improve content discovery, and create a clear path from understanding an opportunity to beginning an application.

Information architecture and page hierarchy were refined so that visitors could move from broad institutional content to award-specific details, requirements, and application access with less ambiguity.

The public experience also established a more consistent bridge into the applicant portal. Calls to action were placed after the information needed to make a decision, so applying felt like the next step in the same journey rather than an abrupt jump into another system.

Analytics, interviews, workflow mapping, prototyping, and validation helped prioritize the moments where clarity mattered most. The result connected public discovery, guided applications, and role-based evaluation through shared patterns.

1. Guide applicantsBreak complex requirements into visible steps with contextual guidance, validation, and progress.
2. Support operational rolesGive administrators, committees, team leads, and judges the information and actions appropriate to each responsibility.
3. Scale the ecosystemUse a shared bilingual design system across the website, applicant portal, and management platform.

The strongest signal was not a single screen—it was a clearer journey for applicants and a more structured operating model for the teams managing the awards.

Metrics reflect approved project reporting. No private analytics or applicant data are shown.

Complex enterprise products become easier when the team designs around responsibilities, decisions, and transitions—not around a collection of pages. Making status, ownership, and next actions visible reduced friction for both occasional and expert users.

The project also reinforced the value of treating bilingual behavior and system patterns as foundational decisions. They made the three products feel connected while giving each one enough flexibility for its purpose.

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