Financial inclusion for small businesses in Africa.

2022

YEAR

Co-founder / UX designer

Role

Startup

CLIENT

INTRODUCTION

When I visited Lagos, Nigeria, a few months ago, I was struck by how prevalent digital payment was, particularly at point of sale.

As Lagos continues to transition to a cashless economy and expands its use of technology, many small businesses (solo-preneurs) are left behind due to the high cost of aqcuring POS machines, internet tariff and lack of reliable electricity supply.

2022

YEAR

Co-founder / UX designer

Role

Startup

CLIENT

GOAL STATEMENT

Our solution will let users make payment for goods and services using their smartphones, which will affect vendors by allowing them to receive digital payments without a POS.

I brainstormed concept solutions to facilitate payments with the use of QR codes and PWA.

FIRST STEP

I conducted a survey of the payment landscape to determine which payment methods people preferred. I then created a brief questionnaire with scenarios to understand which payment method people are more likely to use in different scenarios.

USER PERSONAS

User Persona
User Persona

AMAKA - MERCHANT

Age: 35
Education: College
Family: Husband and two kids
Occupation: Retailer

FRUSTRATIONS

  • I cannot receive payments when network is down
  • The delay between receiving a transfer and it reflecting in my account could be annoying.
  • Trust issues
  • Cost of internet

GOALS

  • To be able to get paid for services seamlessly, even without internet or network service.
  • To be able to recieve payment in my absence
User Persona-2

DAVID - PAYER

Age: 25
Education: Undergraduate
Family: Girlfriend
Occupation: Software dev intern

FRUSTRATIONS

  • Vendors want you to pay for goods before seeing them
  • Having to withdraw cash as an alternative when POSs do not work is annoying
  • Trust issues
  • Cost of internet

GOALS

  • To be able to confirm item bought online before making payment
  • Avoiding the long queues at stores when trying to pay for items
  • Avoid installing another payment app

SOLUTION

The solution I designed consists of 2 main interfaces, a merchant app interface that let’s small businesses generate QR codes to recieve payments and the second part of the solution is a progresive web app (PWA) that let’s users make payment without app installation. This progressive web app is launched when users scan the QR code opening up the web browser on their phone.

HIGH FIDELITY

In the design, I focused on a simplistic design with no ornamentation. One clear single call-to-action button per screen, guiding the user through a step by step flow to complete the task.

MERCHANT APP

PROTOTYPE

Using Protopie I was able to make this hyper-realistic fidelity prototype showing the process of a customer using Feego to make payment via scanning a QR code.

CONCLUSION

I created this hype-realistic prototype in Protopie to validate the feasibility of the idea and also convince potential investors of the possibilities of this product