It started with a bad food delivery

When I first moved to Turkey, one of the simplest things became unexpectedly difficult: ordering food.

The photos looked great. I placed an order, but what arrived looked nothing like what I had seen on the app. Then the driver called. We struggled to understand each other, he couldn't find my location, and I had no way to properly communicate or track what was happening.

It was a small experience, but it stayed with me.

The problem wasn't really the food, the driver, or even the interface. There were several systems involved, but they didn't really work together.

That became our starting point for the NSosyal SuperApp Creathon at TEKNOFEST Istanbul 2025, one of the world's largest technology festivals, bringing together technology competitions and young innovators from across Türkiye and around the world.

For us, this wasn't just another hackathon. We were stepping into one of Türkiye's most significant technology competitions, surrounded by teams building everything from AI systems to aerospace technologies.

And we had 36 hours to build something worth listening to.

The brief was bigger than an interface

NSosyal is a Turkish social media platform. For the competition, we were asked to explore how it could evolve into a SuperApp by bringing together social media, messaging, commerce, transportation, and payments.

There were plenty of directions we could have taken. We could add more features, redesign individual modules, or simply make the existing experience look more polished.

We decided to approach it differently.

The question I kept bringing back to the team was:

What makes several services feel like one product?

For us, the answer was integration.

Not putting modules next to each other, but designing the relationships between them. A payment should understand what you are buying. A delivery experience should connect to messaging. A social post should be able to become a transaction without forcing the user to start over somewhere else.

That became the principle behind our entire concept.

Designing the connections

As Team Lead, I worked across the product direction and UI/UX process, while collaborating closely with Bilal on the technical side and Ananda on the broader design and visual execution.

One of my main responsibilities was keeping the team aligned around the experience rather than letting us design each feature independently.

We mapped the core journeys first.

A user discovers something through social content. They want to know more. They decide to buy it. They pay. They track the delivery. If something goes wrong, they can communicate directly.

The important part was that the user shouldn't feel like they were moving between five different products.

This also changed how we thought about the interface.

Instead of designing every module as its own destination, we treated the modules as parts of a connected system. The UI had to make those transitions feel natural.

The idea that changed the direction

The most interesting problem turned out to be social media.

At first, social media was simply another module inside the SuperApp. But we started asking what would happen if social wasn't just something users consumed, but something that could actively drive the other modules.

That led us to Social Commerce.

Imagine someone sharing a meal they genuinely enjoyed. Instead of opening another application, searching for the restaurant, finding the same item, and going through the checkout process again, a friend could simply interact with that post and buy it.

See → share → discover → buy.

The social layer becomes part of the transaction itself.

This was more than adding a shopping button to a social feed. We were trying to change the relationship between discovery, trust, and purchase.

People already recommend restaurants, products, and services to their friends. We simply asked: what if the product experience could follow that behavior?

Making the interface disappear

Once the system started coming together, another decision became important: how much interface do we actually need?

A SuperApp can easily become overwhelming. There are more services, more possibilities, and more things competing for attention.

We chose a relatively minimal interface because the user shouldn't have to think about the complexity behind the product.

If I'm hungry, I want to order food.

If I'm waiting for a driver, I want to know where they are.

If my order has a problem, I want to reach someone.

The interface should make those things obvious without asking the user to learn how the system works.

For us, this was one of the more important UX decisions in the project: simplicity wasn't the visual direction. It was a consequence of the system being well connected.

36 hours, one team

The design process itself was happening under very different circumstances.

We had 36 hours.

We were working in a competition environment alongside teams with much more formal backgrounds in product design, and we were the only foreign participants in the competition.

That made team management almost as important as the design itself.

I had to make decisions about what we should explore, what we should cut, and where each person could contribute most effectively. We had to move quickly without losing the reasoning behind what we were building.

There were also unexpected challenges along the way, from last-minute design requirements to creating visual assets and refining the story we would eventually present to the jury.

At some point, the work stopped feeling like separate roles.

Product thinking, UI, technical feasibility, storytelling, and presentation were constantly feeding into each other.

That collaboration was probably one of the most valuable parts of the experience for me.

From screens to a story

By the time we reached the final presentation, we weren't presenting a collection of screens anymore.

We were presenting an argument for how NSosyal could evolve.

The prototype showed the interface, but the user flows explained the system behind it. Social Commerce explained where the platform could go next. And the story connected those decisions back to a simple observation: people don't experience services as separate modules. They experience the journey.

That distinction mattered.

We weren't trying to design the most features.

We were trying to make the existing and proposed functions behave as though they belonged to the same experience.

And then, the result

When we entered the competition, we didn't fully understand how significant the stage was.

TEKNOFEST had brought together hundreds of thousands of teams and competitors from Türkiye and around the world, with thousands eventually making it to the festival's final stages.

Standing there as three international students from Bartın, presenting a SuperApp concept to the jury, already felt far removed from where we had started.

Then our name was called.

Third place, NSosyal SuperApp Creathon.

For us, it was more than a competition result. It was a genuinely proud moment: three students, one team, 36 hours, and a product concept that had started from something as ordinary as getting a meal delivered.

What I took from it

TEKNOFEST was my first major experience working in Product Design at this scale.

It taught me that the difficult part of designing a product isn't always deciding what the interface should look like. Sometimes it's deciding what should connect to what, what should happen next, and what the user should never have to think about.

As the team lead, I also learned that good product work is rarely a solo design exercise. My role was partly about designing the product, but just as importantly, it was about keeping three different perspectives moving in the same direction.

We finished the competition with a third-place result in the NSosyal SuperApp category.

For me, the more lasting result was the process itself: taking an everyday frustration, turning it into a product problem, and working with a small team to turn that problem into something people could actually experience.

— with love, Noufal, Ananda and Bilal
PS. Special thanks to the pers who covered our journey

[TRT Indonesia]
https://lnkd.in/djsJCw2d
[HaberKenti, Turkish Local Media]
https://lnkd.in/dVbAT5jx
[iNews, Indonesia]
https://lnkd.in/dtK-jTYx