Classifying Saudi Arabia's government tech vendors

What the platform does

A Saudi government authority classifies local and international ICT vendors that want to work with government entities. Vendors fill out a detailed questionnaire, and the authority scores it to give them a technical tier. That tier is a major factor in deciding the largest government contract a company can be awarded. Certificates also expire after twelve months, so every classified company goes through the questionnaire again each year.

The program is part of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 push to bring more private tech companies into government work. Everything runs through one platform. We designed and delivered its bilingual public site, vendor registration, the classification journey and the government-facing portal. The project is too large to cover in one case study, so this one focuses on classification, the part every vendor has to go through.

Phase one

I joined in 2021 as the sole designer. There was no existing product design to work from, only the authority's brand guidelines and some input from their design team.

Two months in, our CEO asked me to take on product management on our side of the project as well, and let me hire a designer so the design work could keep moving. She joined by the end of the year. The project grew to more than 35 people across engineering, QA, business analysis and design. I led two business analysts and, with our designer, worked with the client and the client's consultants on the solution.

Together we designed the vendor portal, the government-facing portal and the public site. The two analysts and I also spent two months on site in Saudi Arabia with the client team, where most of the big decisions got made in person. Phase one wrapped in 2023 and moved into support.

Phase two

The project started again in early 2026, and I rejoined to lead product design with a senior designer.

In the meantime, the authority's internal team had built a new, more mature design system, and the platform had to move onto it. We redesigned the core flows on the new system and added the components it was missing.

The client also wanted new features, including a faster way to renew and an AI assistant that answers questions about the classification rules. They wanted the assistant visible at all times, to cut support requests and let vendors find answers themselves.

The questionnaire

The questionnaire has four levels: the company, each category it works in, each activity inside a category, and each part of the value chain it offers for that activity. Every new category or activity adds more questions. A vendor with only two activities already answers 31 questions, and most answer far more.

The answer types vary a lot, from free text and multiple choice to yes or no with evidence, templates with repeating rows and required attachments.

Answering a question was rarely the problem. Knowing where you were among all of them was.

One question per page, and a grid for the rest

Before, every question under an activity sat in one long list. Some take seconds to answer and others take an hour of gathering documents, but they all shared the same scroll. With the assistant fixed to the right of the form, that list got crowded. We moved the questionnaire to one question per page, so each one could be read and worked on by itself, next to the assistant.

Focus view. One question per page with its guidance, and Skip next to Next.

That fixed the clutter, but it made it easy to get lost. The form is four levels deep, and now you only saw one question at a time. So we designed a way to step back and see everything.

• Focus view shows one question per page, with its tooltip, inputs and attachments.
• Grid view shows every question as a card, grouped by level. Answered questions turn green, so you can see what is left.

Grid view. Every question as a card, grouped by level, with answered questions in green.

• Any card in the grid opens that question in focus view, and one button takes you back to the grid. You keep your place both ways.

The form also has search and filters, a count of remaining questions, auto-save and drafts. We added a Skip link next to Next. Both move you forward, but Skip makes it clear you can leave a question and come back to it later without losing anything.

The client and their consultants reviewed and approved the grid and focus model in demos. It has been live since June 2026 with no negative feedback so far, but we have not measured it yet. Next we want to track completion time, drop-off by section, and support requests about finding questions.

Fast Track

Since certificates expire every year, the client asked for a faster way to renew, and we designed Fast Track.

There are three paths. If nothing has changed, renewal is one click and last year's answers carry over. If something has changed, the vendor gets a short questionnaire with new mandatory questions from policy updates, new questions for activities added to their commercial registration, and optional questions that could raise their score. Anyone can still choose the full questionnaire.

Most of the work was explaining eligibility. A vendor should see on one screen why they have twelve questions instead of a hundred, and what the optional ones could do for their score. Their previous score is shown next to the questionnaire.

Fast Track splits questions into what a returning vendor must answer, what is new since last year, and what could raise their score.

Where it stands

The platform is live nationally. More than 1,400 vendors have registered through it, and nine in ten are small and medium businesses. Registration, technical classification and Fast Track are all live, and it's now the route every tech vendor takes to work with the Saudi government.