Lebanese coffee is not a beverage with settings. It is a ritual with opinions. How strong, how much water, how much qishweh sits on top, whether the cup is single or double - these are not preferences, they are identity, and everyone in the room already knows yours.
Café Najjar set out to put that ritual inside a machine. Not a generic espresso unit with an Arabic label, but the Najjar Raqwa Q2 - a patented capsule system engineered specifically to produce authentic Lebanese coffee, with the right aroma, the right depth and real qishweh, in forty-five seconds.
The machine was moving from physical controls to a digital interface. That shift promised more control and more precision. It also risked something more valuable: turning a warm, instinctive act into a menu.
Mindflares was brought in to make sure it did not.
Strategy
Our strategy was the following:
Preserve every degree of coffee customization the machine is capable of
Make none of it feel technical
Let a person's coffee follow them from one machine to the next
Challenges
The brief arrived with its constraints already fixed. The hardware was defined, the screen was chosen, and the interface had to live inside both.
The interesting problem was not any single constraint. It was that they pulled in opposite directions: the richest possible coffee configuration, on the poorest possible canvas.
Methodology
We treated this as an interaction design problem inside an engineering envelope, not a screen-decoration exercise.
Two rules governed the work from the first day:
1.Design within the hardware, not around it. Every proposal had to be renderable, buildable and readable on the actual screen, at the actual distance, in the actual kitchen. Concepts that only worked on a laptop mockup were not concepts.
2.The machine's complexity is the machine's problem. The user's job is to want coffee. Translating that want into serving size, strength, water level, foam and brewing speed is the interface's job - done quietly, in as few decisions as the product allows.
Empathize
Define
Ideate the Solution
Prototype
Experience Validation
Design
Empathize with users (Coffee drinkers)
Nobody stands at a coffee machine to use a coffee machine. They stand there at 7 a.m., half awake, or mid-afternoon with a guest waiting in the next room. Attention is short, patience is shorter, and the reward is expected in under a minute.
So we started with the ritual rather than the interface. What does a person actually decide when they make Lebanese coffee? Which of those decisions are made fresh each time, and which are simply how they take it - settled years ago and never revisited? Where does a household diverge, when one person takes it sweet and another takes it plain?
That distinction turned out to be the hinge of the entire product. Most of what the machine can configure, the user does not want to configure. They want it configured once, correctly, and then honored.
About the Research
Our work focused on the complete coffee-making journey, from approach to first sip:
Ritual analysis: how traditional Lebanese coffee is prepared and served, and which variables genuinely matter to the people drinking it
Journey validation: walking the full machine journey step by step against real preparation behaviour, rather than against the specification sheet
Specification translation: mapping every technical parameter the machine exposes to the plain language and mental model of a coffee drinker
Constraint mapping: establishing precisely what the screen, the controls and the embedded environment could and could not deliver, before ideation rather than after it
Friction isolation: identifying the moments where the interface risked turning a familiar ritual into an unfamiliar configuration task
Define
The research converged on one reframe.
That single shift reordered the whole interaction model. Configuration stopped being the main event and became a one-time act of setup. Recall became the main event. And the interface's job changed from presenting options to protecting a preference.
Personas
We designed for a household, not a user. Each of them needed the same product to behave differently, without any of them ever entering a settings menu.
Ideate the Solution
We mapped the machine as two distinct flows, deliberately separated: one short and run daily, one longer and run rarely.
User Flows
The everyday flow: approach, choose, brew. Short, linear, forgiving, and the one that runs hundreds of times a year.
The setup flow: build a recipe. Single or double serving, capsule type, strength, water level, foam quantity and brewing speed. Longer by necessity, but entered rarely and by choice.
Keeping these apart is what allowed the product to be both detailed and simple. Depth was not removed; it was moved out of the daily path.
Wireframes
Wireframing at this resolution is closer to typesetting than to layout. Every element competes for the same handful of pixels, and there is no color to resolve the argument.
We worked directly at the screen's true dimensions from the first sketch - no scaled-up canvases, no placeholder type. Hierarchy had to be built from position, size and spacing alone, with each state carrying only what the user needed at that exact moment and nothing held over from the step before.
Wording did as much work as layout. On a screen with room for a few words, the difference between a term from the specification sheet and a term from the kitchen is the difference between a product people understand and one they tolerate.
Prototype
Wireframes were elevated into interactive prototypes covering the complete journey - brewing, recipe creation, saving and recall - simulated at the machine's real resolution and real interaction constraints.
The goal was to make the interface behave convincingly enough to be judged as an experience rather than imagined as one, while changes were still cheap and the firmware was still open.
Experience Validation
Prototype testing covered the key journeys end to end:
Everyday brewing, from approach to cup
Full recipe configuration: serving size, capsule type, strength, water level, foam and brewing speed
Saving a recipe as a Coffee Code
Recalling that Coffee Code on a different machine
Testing did what testing is for at this stage of a hardware programme: it surfaced comprehension problems in wording and sequence while they were still edits rather than engineering, confirmed that the interaction model held at the machine's real legibility limits, and gave the client and their engineering team a single shared reference for what the product was going to be.
By the time the interface reached the embedded build, the experience was settled.
Design Brought to Life
The delivered interface turns a specification-heavy control panel into a personal coffee ritual — inside a monochrome screen the size of a business card.
Six principles shaped every state:
Final UI Design: Key screens
Takeaway
Constrained screens are not lesser design problems. They are the honest ones. With no color, no imagery and almost no pixels to hide behind, an interface is left with only what it actually says and the order in which it says it.
The Najjar Raqwa Q2 is a case of designing to limitations rather than in spite of them and finding, in the process, that the strongest idea was not a richer interface but a smaller one that remembers. The thinking transfers directly: embedded and IoT products, automotive HMI, kiosks, wearables and any interface where the hardware, not the imagination, sets the boundary.
Director, Digital Business Channels at Mobily, Saudi Arabia
''A highly professional and reliable team. Through their strong understanding of our business and user needs, Mindflares delivered a high-quality bilingual UI/UX revamp and scalable Design Language System. Their expertise and close collaboration improved usability, consistency, accessibility, and development efficiency across Mobily Business.''
Kassem Baalbaki
Chief Information Officer at SMC Healthcare, Saudi Arabia
''Working with Mindflares has been a professional and collaborative experience. Their team demonstrated a good understanding of our objectives and provided valuable insights to support the continued enhancement of our digital patient experience. Overall, it was a smooth project and timeline was fully respected”
Carole Alsharabati
Founding Partner of Siren Analytics and Siren Associates
"Mindflares is one of those companies that makes magic happen for your products. It starts with a three-word request and ends up with a solidly grounded UX/UI design that conquers and charms the users. Their agility, commitment, and creativity are impressive. They are the kind of partner you need to ace your objectives and succeed in your business."
Wissam Youssef
Co-Founder and General Manager of CME Offshore
"Partnering with Mindflares has been an inspiring and fruitful journey and still is. Mindflares’ approach to business combines high ethics, transparency, and communication skills which were keys to our success."
