Project 💎

Nunua Sasa is a product that offers its users a 'buy now, pay later' service based on their credit.  I worked with a team of 5 to create a e-commerce and credit assessment system. We had regular in-house meetings to ensure business and user needs were met. For privacy reasons, I can only share an overview of the designs and not describe the full case study.

Info 📃

Role: Lead Designer

Timeline: March 2021 - June 2022

Tools: Flutter, Laravel, Figma

Team: 3 Software Engineers, 1 Project Manager, 1 Project Lead

Overview 📋

Problem

Nunua Sasa had an issue onboarding most of its users due to a lengthy registration process. Moreover, users found it difficult to understand how the Nunua Sasa mobile application worked. How can we automate the process plus make the product more understandable to the user?

Outcome

I conducted user research, created a customer journey map, came up with user flows, delivered high fidelity mockups, maintained a design system, worked with the development team to deliver a software solution that improved Nunua Sasa

01 Empathizing with the User 🧡

As a designer, you are in the business of making decisions about "how to change a current situation into a preferred situation". I conducted interviews with the users of the product so as to get a shared understanding of the current situation and create an external alignment.

From the interviews I was able to gather the different experiences users had. Next step was to identify what would be the cause of any negative experiences.

02 Defining The Problem 📌

After conducting interviews, I decided to come up with a Customer Journey map. This would help me to identify the key customer interactions and also know what service combinations can be fixed. I felt like this was the best journey mapping variation since it's scale is limited to a person's experience with a particular product.

Above represents the customer journey map that I was able to come up with. The touchpoints represents the interfaces that the user gets to interact with the product. Every touchpoint requires an action, what the user does to be able to proceed with the required service. My objective when coming up with the customer journey was to identify any pain points and opportunities.

After completing the customer journey map it was evident that there were issues in the onboarding, credit assessment and shopping stages of the platform. In more detail:

• Users during onboarding felt overwhelmed at the amount of information that was required to register to the platform.

• The process of requesting a user's M-Pesa or Bank statement for credit assessment was tedious.

• It takes a long time for the user to complete their main objective which was to shop

With all these details I was able to come up with a user persona which encompasses all our users goals, needs and wants.

The next step would be to come up with possible solutions to help eliminate our users pain points.

03 Ideation 💭

The task here was to come up with as many solutions as possible. With the team we had multiple brainstorming sessions, and bounced multiple ideas off each other discussing the potential impact and drawbacks for each.

Solution

To solve our pain points, we decided to revisit the user flow and make some tweaks there. In the original flow after downloading and opening the app users were prompted to register or sign in to the platform immediately. The issue was in order to become a member of Nunua Sasa one had to complete the registration process which included providing your phone number, email address, national ID and a confirmation picture. Our research showed that new users are usually reluctant to provide their information with ease.

The solution came in two forms:

• We changed the user flow. I thought an e-commerce approach would be better for this product, meaning that users after entering the application can be directed to the shopping page directly. Upon checking out that's when they will be prompted to sign in. This concept is also familiar to most users since they have shopped online before. It allowed us to drive value as soon as possible.

• The registration was also simplified. In order to become a member one only needs a mobile number. But a profile was also included so that any other additional information can be collected through that avenue. The steps to register a user reduced from 6 steps to 2 steps.

04 Prototyping 🛠️

The next stage was to prototype our ideas and concepts. Prototyping allows us to test test our hypothesis so as to know whether our solutions solve the problem at hand.

I started of with simple sketches of the wireframes, then came up with low-fi prototypes and tested them quickly with users to hash out how the user flow should work. Eventually I discussed with the team over the details of the design. We iterated over specifics and ensured there was an alignment.

Since I had a high level overview of the solution, I next came up with high-fi prototypes. Below are images showing the sketches coming to life

05 Testing 🧪

Although each component had already been tested for usability, I wanted to ensure that the onboarding experience was smooth and the product made sense. I conducted a full usability test with 8 people, 4 of whom had used the product before. Here are the results.

I was pleased with the results. The current users were able to understand Nunua Sasa and saw the value. New users were still able to figure out the product on their own. There was a major in improvement on all tasks. Some of them had an increased success rate of 100%.

06 Reflecting on the outcomes 📈

It was fun being part of this project, it challenged me to be a better designer from multiple points. Main lessons learnt in this project are:

• Getting buy-ins

I learnt as a designer part of your role is to show the ROI on UI/UX. One must learn how to sell their ideas and not defend them without any base. This included design decisions, process decisions.

• Document Everything

Its quite helpful to always leave information behind. This helps both the team and I. At times I would run into weird cases where no one would know why it was built or designed that way. Leaving detailed notes became the norm. I also took this opportunity to try out Loom (free trial) which makes documentation easier.

• Build Relationships

It was a fun experience being part of this product. I got to build deeper relationships and connections. Since the team was from different background I also got to learn a lot from them. Shout out to Diana Okado, Elvis Moraa, Ian Irungu and Josemaria Nabangi

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