LIMAH's First Decade

Jason Lewis talks to the Middle East Consultant about his firm's first decade, the importance of experience design and growth.

• Give us an overview of LIMAH’s business and achievements over the last year?

We ended last year with a few awards under our belt which allowed the team to celebrate but also pushed me to really consider and decide on where LIMAH will go in the future. It was an opportunity to reflect and see our accomplishments but also see we have only scratched the surface in creating a truly global design firm. I have always run the business as a startup, almost the same as how tech startups run; they are lean, fast moving and agile. We as a team refocused our attention and regrouped to be sure we are always hustling and outworking anyone else in the business and that we are providing an exceptional experience for both our clients and our fellow team members.

We have begun working with EMAAR on a number of projects which has been an important milestone for us. An area we are passionate about is accessible design, something we have always put into all of our projects even if current building codes don’t require. With that in mind, we were pleased to be awarded the project to develop the Qatar Standards for Accessible Transport in collaboration with WSP and is a project we are still working on.

Internally an area that has had the most impact is transparency and constant reminders on our vision of the future. By getting the whole team aligned it’s been a big boost to our productivity. We started giving metrics to every team and making everyone aware of how to read and understand the metrics. When the company wins, the team wins and that energy has been very helpful in our growth. At LIMAH, we currently track over 200 different metrics across 5 teams, and I have access to dashboards which are updated weekly. Having your whole team understand and know these metrics is a great foundation to a high-performance culture.

 

• LIMAH is celebrating its 10^th anniversary this year. What are some of the major goals/milestones you’ve achieved during the last decade?

For me personally one of the areas I am most proud of is our culture and the development of our team. In the early days when we are small, it’s quite hard to get people to buy into your vision. Especially as my vision was to create a global design firm with such unique niche services. Over time we have been able to bring into the studio a passionate group that has started to share that vision and made it grow faster. I’ve noticed that those who haven’t stayed with us or needed to be removed were always those that just didn’t care much about the vision or the future. The team we have now is very dedicated and recognize how important our culture is to our future.

Our new studio in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai has been both the most challenging and rewarding part of our growth. Executing any type of project for yourself and your business is hard. We tend to be our own worst clients and challenges with contractors and deadlines don’t help. However now that the studio is done, it’s really the place I had in mind from day one of LIMAH. I wanted a studio that really showcased our brand to the public and allowed clients to visit and collaborate with the team in comfort. For starters, the workspace doesn’t look like an office. At first impression the most common response is wow and what is this place? Entering it feels more like an art exhibition space or a funky furniture showroom. A rotating collection of art, sculpture and one-off furniture pieces welcome the guests. With 12 metre high ceilings the team collaborates together in large open spaces but has plenty of opportunities for quiet, smaller team meetings. Prototypes and drawings seem to be found everywhere. The giant sofa on the ground level has become a popular meeting place or for the public resting their tired feet from exploring the neighbourhood’s numerous art galleries, not to mention a great place to catch a nap during a long day of design workshops. The space was designed to make sure employees stay happy, comfortable and inspired to do their best work.

The team was honoured to win both the “Specialist Consulting Company” of the Year and “Workplace of the Year” at the 2016 Middle East Consultant Awards. Being recognized by our peers was a really great experience for the team. While we always celebrate our wins and hard work internally it’s nice to get that praise from outside the studio. As in the case of “Workplace of the Year”, again it’s down to a great culture and that’s something I care deeply about.

I can recall in the early days, potential clients are often reluctant to give a contract to the new company and this is a big obstacle when you know you have a great service. Over the years as our brand and reputation become more solid it has been exciting and rewarding to be selected to work on major projects such as Zayed City, Expo 2020, Knowledge Economic City, City of Madinah, Yas South and Deira Mall. This has solidified us as the “go-to” company for largescale projects, and these are the types of projects we can add the most value in.

To celebrate our 10 years, the team just completed a book entitled DECADE. It’s a summary of the history, some of our key projects, featured articles and team biographies which we are sharing with our clients and colleagues.

 

• The market today is very different compared to 10-years ago. How does LIMAH differentiate itself from other firms offering similar services?

 

When LIMAH was first founded, our main focus was on wayfinding. The approach was that wayfinding is not signage, rather signage was just one of the tools we can use among many to create a great customer experience. This attention to the customer experience has become our main focus of work; creating exceptional human experiences. This has made our studio quite broad and unique in its offering. We look at built environments from each and every step of the user’s journey, from the moment they leave home, visit the space and return. This has allowed us to bring into our offering digital design, customer services design, user experience and public art. We differentiate ourselves by not just designing signage, but rather the complete holistic experience.

 

• What are your plans for your business going forward? Is growth/expansion into other markets on the table?

We are quite well known in the GCC region, having collaborated with many of the world’s top architects and project management consultants. They have all stressed the need for our services within their other office regions. We are currently researching other markets which are definitely lacking in the type of services we provide. We expect to have a presence in 2 more markets by the end of first quarter 2018, being London and Singapore. Due to the nature of our work and how we have structured the company, we do intend for the brand to be global within the next 3 to 5 years.

 

• What are the opportunities and challenges for your firm in the GCC countries in the current market climate? Are there any standout markets that you would like to highlight?

Our biggest challenge has been the same since day one; there is still a general market misunderstanding of the value effective wayfinding can bring to a large scale built environment. This misunderstanding has allowed for very basic approaches to be applied to projects across the region, even major infrastructure such as airports. The misunderstanding stems from the belief that signage and wayfinding are the same things. Many sites simply have signs added to them at late stages, and these signs merely provide direction, often incorrectly. However, our best clients have recognized the wayfinding we offer is a strategy. It’s a strategy that is implemented to improve the sites performance, ease flow, get users where we want them to be, influence them in positive ways, and ultimately get them to return and tell others of their positive experience. In this sense, signage is used as a tool, along with digital design, public art, user experience design, mapping, environmental graphics and communications design. This approach is our biggest opportunity as more and more developers have had bad past experiences our poor performing projects, and now see the value in engaging LIMAH.

 

• Which sectors/verticals are showing the most promise in the GCC market, and how do you plan to deal with current market challenges?

Healthcare, education and retail have shown the most promise for us in the region. These types of projects benefit from effective wayfinding. Hospitality has always been a strong player and does make up a majority of our current work, however, these tend to be focused more on design with little strategic work required. As we get more and more into the large-scale and important infrastructure projects our strategic work plays a huge role as we can influence people’s daily lives creating ease of movement through spaces. The retail sector is a growing segment and clients begin to learn of our work in customer experience design. As competition increases for people attention to brands, more and more businesses are recognizing they need to do something exceptional to stand out.  This is where we come in, assessing and designing the complete customer journey through both the digital and physical space.

 

• Have there been any new approaches/innovations/technologies that have enabled you to offer better services to your customers?

We are ones for constant and never-ending improvement and it’s become a core value in our teams. We have regular in-studio critiques not only on the work itself but in how we work. This has led to complete overhauls, particularly in our early strategic work. Unfortunately, our packages are heavily copied within in the industry which is another reason we are always developing our process and deliverables. The study of the complete user journey has led us more into the digital space, design mobile apps and digital content for built environments. BIM has become a standard in our studio and now we have started exploring virtual reality as a means of conceptual design.

 

• Limah offers a variety of services/expertise. In terms of business value, what has grown/shrunk in the last year and why do you think this is the case?

We have seen over the last year, in particular, a rise in the number of projects and RFP’s strictly focused on Public Art. This is a service we have put much effort into expanding and we see a real need for professional expertise in this area. Most exciting for us is we are currently engaged in a number of projects which are strictly Customer Experience. In these, we are studying the complete customer journey and seeking ways to enhance and improve it. I think we are seeing a rise in this for our business purely because of awareness. There has always been a need in the market for these services, but when it comes new types of services, often clients, and we ourselves have difficulty articling the need and the value. It’s taken us a few years to actually define clearly the services and the deliverables and test the concepts. Now we are at a stage where more and more clients and getting to know us as an “experience design firm” offing more than just wayfinding.

 

• In relation to the above, which of these segments do you think will be the biggest contributor to your bottom-line in the next year or two?

Experience design we expect will become the biggest part of growth for our business. In this service, we aren’t limited to property developers as in the case of wayfinding. Rather this service can be offered to any business. Currently, we are working within the fitness and retail space designing customer journeys and this broadens our market. Wayfinding will always be our core and the majority of our business, but we do expect public art and experience design to make up 40% of our business in the next 3 to 5 years. This aligns perfectly with most our most valuable architecture clients who to see the need for attention to the user experience. They can keep costs down by collaborating with a team such as ourselves, rather than trying to develop an in-house team which needs to be large and multidisciplinary.

 

• Take us through any recent changes you’ve made internally in terms of operations, processes, staff, etc. to align with current market realities.

As with any growing company there comes a time for the founder to assign responsibility to others in order to focus on the most important parts of the business. Over the years I’ve recognized I have less and less time to focus on individual projects. This has made me turn my attention to coaching and mentoring my team in order to have the same abilities in caring for clients. We shifted teams around the studio and recently made one of our long-time team members Amer Mansour, Head of Projects. This has provided a safety net for myself and team ensuring our projects are being managed correctly. Creativity and strategy are so critical in our work, we have trained 3 talented Senior Designers; Noor Al Shawa, Leslie Francia and Tom Davies. This team takes ownership of the projects and allows me to spend time with advice on strategy or any key design issues. I see my role moving forward breaking down into 3 major areas: global growth and building the brand, team coaching and mentoring and ensuring we have an exceptional service and client experience. With this in mind, we are always testing and experimenting with the team and finding ways we can improve for our clients and for our culture.

 

• Please highlight your top three ongoing projects in the GCC. In brief, discuss client requirements, your approach, as well as any interesting challenges relating to the project, and the expertise the project drew upon from your company.

Yas South Resort – Abu Dhabi – Miral – The resort is to be a mixed-use community with a total area of 1 million square metres. The development integrates residential neighbourhoods, a 4-star family hotel & destination resort, a 5-star lifestyle hotel, a multi-purpose arena, and retail & entertainment destinations along an active waterfront promenade. Due to its size and a mix of components, we could not apply a single approach to the project, rather we started with a strategy that would allow users to both explore and find when needed any destination within the resort. This led to the uniqueness of the components designed within areas but yet with shared components for harmony. Often in large-scale developing information is either overwhelming being too much or too little. We brought in digital applications combined with tradition signage in order to guide to major destinations, yet still, explore F&B and retail offerings through touch screens. Although we were engaged as a wayfinding consultant on this project our approach to experience design played a key role. By having empathy for each user we often come with unexpected design solutions. One example was the arena tickets where we designed in a parking strategy to be sure guests park in the best locations to get to the arena on time and with ease.

The Wharf – Dubai – Meraas – Located within the La Mer project in Jumeirah, The Wharf is a vintage themed F&B destination along the beach. The area is actually quite small and intimate and the client was very focused on authenticity. Our work here covered wayfinding, signage and public art. Within the space are over 100 works of wall art, neon signs and floor graphics. Each and every one needed to be original, and for some, we even went as far as to create fake vintage brands to give the look of an old sign, long forgotten. While the majority of our work is about shiny and new, here we got to play with rust, bullet holes, damaged and bent parts and flickering neon. Street art is still quite new to Dubai so it was great to get a chance to put our mark on the scene. There are 30 plus works of original street art underway which will be great for tourists and residents to share across social media. Definitely, a unique area coming soon to Dubai.

Deira Mall – Dubai – Nakheel –Planned to be larger than Dubai Mall, with 4.5 million square feet of gross leasable area and due to open in 2020will be Deira Mall. Choosing where to shop amongst Dubai’s many megamalls is a task in itself. Malls in the city cater to all types of luxury, family, and discount. Interestingly though according to our research, many malls in the city contain many of the same retail shops. The challenge therein for Mall developers then becomes how they can make the shopping experience better than any other competitive retail offering. When Nakheel selected LIMAH for this challenging project, the team’s early research brought to light a few key points that would need consideration in developing a site-wide customer experience for the mall.

1. The mall is to target middle income and families, not aimed at the luxury retail sector. This will have an impact on not only materials selection but the overall developed concept. Further, the strategy should consider the needs of a broad user base including families with young children.
2. Cost of implementation for new technologies and concepts not seen yet in the market.

• Public Art was is a desirable feature but concerns of cost could halt implementation.

1. Parking is one of the most stressful situations in shopping malls, needed solutions that could minimize the negative effect on the property as a whole.
2. Due to the sheer size of the mall, customer experience is diminished and leads to user stress.
3. The retractable roof changes the environment inside the mall, and therefore material and lighting choice becomes important for durability on interior elements designed.

My background in retail and particularly in large retail developments was beneficial in setting early strategies. One of the core principles we used was that all users should have an understanding of their current location at all times. We wanted to influence the cognitive map in the user’s mind. This would apply even before entering the mall. If I want to go to see a movie, for example, that decision should be made before I even enter the mall parking in order to streamline traffic flows. This means we needed to inform guests on exterior through signage and other visual clues. This approach was best done through some important collaborations with the architectural teams. By doing so I can have the greatest impact the user experience by allowing them to park near their desired destinations.

The sheer size of the mall set to be Dubai’s largest became an obstacle in itself. While large-scale retail is a draw for tourists and first-time users, the challenge for developers is to build a space that is useful to daily and regular users as well. This challenge was overcome through collaborations on an intuitive architecture such as the use of street layout principles. Further, we assessed user comprehension and opportunities to influence the user’s mindset and orientation. After a careful analysis, we determined that minimal signage was the best approach. Rather visual clues, architecture, space differentiation and public art play an important part in our strategy. A number of Dubai’s largest malls are known to be nightmares in navigation. We wanted to avoid those same mistakes. In the end empathy for the end user, solved a number of problems. This process of design thinking is what has made LIMAH the preferred experience designer partner for many of the region’s largest projects. Just simply answering the question ‘what would I want if I went shopping for the day?’ resulted in many of the proposed experience and wayfinding design solutions.

 

View the original article as it appears in the MEC magazine here. 

Can I help you create an exceptional human experience? Connect with me @ limahdesign.com or @monopolyofone