MICROCRED

OPPORTUNITY

"What is the next step to bring financial services and products to the unbanked, mass market in Africa and around the world?"

Microcred capitalized on the rising use of mobile devices in Africa and created the Baobab app concept: a banking application that brings all Microcred's financial services to its customers.

The plan was to build an release a MVP to Microcred's employees in Senegal and Madagascar.

ROLE

I worked with Operations, Business Analysts, Product Owners and Developers to define the MVP roadmap and features and made sure business goals were aligned with customers needs.

I lead internal interviews with stakeholders to understand needs and frustration and designed process and solutions to improve and streamline our workflows simplify hand-off to developers.

I've implemented daily stand-ups and design critiques sessions that helped improve communication between cross-functionnal teams.

WORK

We've defined the core features based on Microcred's experience and knowledge about our markets and customers. We had to work fast to reach the market and stay ahead of our competitors.

We've sketched out flows and ideas to test internally and moved to the wireframes stage right after. The team also worked closely with a freelance graphic designer to create the illustrations and fine-tune visual identity. 

We wanted to explore and test different hypothesis so an important part of my work was to setup recurring user research and testing sessions.

My team on the field was in 'guerrilla mode': regularly visiting customers, running micro interviews in cities, gathering feedback from agencies staff.

I've also built an Invision prototype and planned semi moderated testing sessions with 12 customers.

We've asked customers to perform tasks with the prototype and observed their interactions and reactions. 

A big challenge was that most customers are reluctant to express their feelings, some of them are not tech-savvy or don't understand French or English. 

We've learned a lot: color is extremely important to customers who can't read so we've improved the main navigation with recognizable colors (e.g. Loan is orange).

Here's an example of an animated prototype we've used during the user testing session made with Principle. Crafting animations and micro interactions definitely helps users interact more easily with the prototype.

Role
UX Team Manager

Period
2016-2017 (12 months) 

Skills
Qualitative research, Usability testing, Team management, Leadership, Agile

Deliverables
Sitemap, user flows, wireframes, interactive prototypes, interview scripts

Team
Astrid, Manden & Daniel, Denis, The POs