Mistwash
Two Progressive Web Apps — customer and operations — to help a Dubai car-wash startup scale beyond phone-and-spreadsheet bookings.
Mistwash is a mobile steam car-wash service in the UAE — booked to your driveway or to your car in a mall parking lot. I designed the experience that let them scale past a manual, phone-based operation.
The constraint
I usually start by exhausting every data source. Here there was almost none: no direct channel to customers, no quantitative data, no field studies (the client was in Dubai). I worked from the business owner’s specifications and my partner’s on-site visits with the CEO — a good lesson in designing well under real-world limits.
The problem, both sides
- Customers booked over the phone with the CEO himself, or through a slow account flow, with no way to track progress.
- The business couldn’t scale: the CEO distributed jobs by hand via spreadsheets, and payment was cash or a card reader.
What we built
Two Progressive Web Apps instead of one:
- Customer app — book a wash, pay, and track status, with phone verification and a clear, always-visible CTA.
- Team app — worker verification, a jobs list, job detail, and live status updates.
I leaned on PWA features (installability, offline support, mobile web payments, phone auth, SMS status updates) and mobile-specific UX — a sticky app bar, progress bar, autofilled forms, a persistent bottom CTA — plus a color styleguide and icon library to hold it all together.
