App · Research

Mabrook

A community iOS app connecting people with their mosque and its events.

Mabrook was Monty’s first major project: a four-person startup Monty co-founded, with an iOS app connecting people to their mosque and its events. The team piloted it with the Muslim Community of Knoxville. The app never launched, but it’s how wavedepth ended up hiring all four of them.

Designing from research

Mabrook’s users were Arab and non-Arab, English and Arabic speakers, so Monty needed a mix of data. Before committing to anything, the team tested its icons and fonts with 30 people.

Almost everyone read the house as home, and 80% read the praying figure as prayer. The connections icon was all over the place: more than 20 different answers, and the most common one got only 13%. The team redesigned the icons people didn’t get, and in the end the app only needed two tab icons: home and profile. The fonts were Inter and Merienda One: Inter was the clear pick for body text (60%), and Merienda One for captions (47%).

The six icons from the survey: house, connections, praying figure, giving hand, mosque, and note — The six icons in the survey.

The two icons that made it into the app.

What word comes to mind for each icon, 30 responses.

The two font samples from the survey — Inter and Merienda One, the two fonts in the survey.

Font survey results for the two fonts — What each font suits best, 30 responses.

Shipping it

Admins post three kinds of updates: announcements; events with a date, description, image, and how often they repeat; and flyers as images or PDFs. Members commit to events and see who else is going, and the feed opens on the Hijri date.

Monty ran every task and timeline across design, iOS, and backend through ClickUp, designed screens in Figma, wrote big parts of the Swift iOS app, and built the backend REST API with PHP and Firebase.

Welcome screen, post types, and the community feed — Welcome, the three post types, and the feed, branded for the pilot mosque.

Admin screens: post an event, post a flyer, my events, and committed users — The admin side: post events and flyers, then see who committed.

Where it led

Mabrook never launched, but it opened the next door. Looking for advice, Monty and the team went to wavedepth’s creative director and got the hard truth: apps for communities and events are some of the hardest things to build. Then came an offer. Their talents were good, and they should come work at wavedepth. All four of them did, and that’s where Dollar-A-Day and the Johnson & Johnson research came from.