Raising revenue and engagement through research, design and prototyping for iKhokha’s value added services

Project Summary

Client
iKhokha
A fintech startup that helps businesses accept credit card payments through the iKhokha card machine and accompanying native mobile app.

Goal
Raise revenue and engagement for in app value added services
Increase the amount of sales that vendors made to customers for services like prepaid airtime.

Role
Lead user experience designer
Solo UX designer with B.A.’s and a data analysis team that reported to me.

Tasks
Research / Design / Testing
From discovery to delivery, I performed various UX tasks from user research and visual design to usability testing.

Deliverable
Feature Re design
Redesigned the menu for the native mobile app to raise discoverability across iOS and Android.

Timeline
1 month
Completed the project over 4 weeks from mid January to February 2020.

Results
Raised revenue by 68% and engagement by 75%
Measured over 30 days through Firebase analytics.

The Problem

iK Vend — a feature in the iKhokha app, that allowed vendors to sell products like airtime to customers — was barely being used, not bringing in much revenue and worst of all, management had no idea what to do about it.

Despite an expensive and exhaustive social media campaign that resulted in thousands of hits, few people were using the feature as it struggled to gain traction in the app.

I realised that it was not a marketing problem nor a question of awareness. So I dusted off my 🔍 and started to dig deeper. Cue the dramatic detective music.

UX Audit

Mapping the current iK Vend user flow

To begin with, I mapped out and viewed at a high level, where in the current user journey iK Vend lived.

Here’s what I discovered:

1. I found that it took at least 5 taps to find the feature.
2. While getting to it, you had to navigate numerous menu tab items, that were not named intuitively. Giving you no clue of where you going or what you were able to do once you got there.
3. Some of the tabs were not even features that were currently active in the app for many vendors. A good example was iK Plus, a feature of which only a few iK vendors qualified for.

Having discovered from the UX audit that the feature was hard to find, I needed to validate this finding with users.

User Research

We conducted 6 contextual inquiries at vendors stores and found the same problem over and over again.

Why I chose contextual inquiry over other research methods

Which method I choose is always determined by 3 factors:
• What do we want to learn?
• How and where can we best learn it?
• What can our test subjects accommodate?

🔍
It was clear that users were aware of iK Vend which meant we had to find out why they were not using it in the app.

💈
Because our users are busy small business owners, there was no way that they could take time out and leave their stores to make the trip to our offices just to be interviewed.

💡
The best way was to go to their stores and observe them during normal day to day business activities and find out why they were not using iK Vend.

How I determined which vendors to visit

1. After briefing our analytics team on what we were trying to do, I asked them to identify the best vendors to visit based on revenue. These customers would have the biggest effect on turning the feature around when we fixed it.
2. We narrowed that list down to those that were within a 25km radius of our HQ and came up with a list of 6 vendors. This was a good sample size given what we wanted to learn and the time we had to re design anything we needed to.
3. I recruited the 3 best performing members of our sales team and leaned on their years of experience in the field to tell me which days of the week and at which time of the day would be best to go out and see the vendors. We didn’t want to go out to vendors at their busiest times and be a distraction.
4. I also asked the sales team members to help me run the sessions when we went out. These guys had developed personal relationships with vendors over years, so they’d be far better at talking to them about their problems than I would.
5. I had the sales guys call our list of vendors to ask for their permission to come and see them. After we explained why, the vendors were thrilled that someone was actually leaving the office to pay attention to what was happening in the field and at their stores. We didn’t need any other incentive to recruit participants.

How I ran the inquiries

After pulling this cross functional A-Team together, I wrote up a short protocol and briefed the team on what we’d do when we went to vendors:

Primer — We’d introduce ourselves to the vendors, telling them who we were, what we were there to learn and how long it would take.

Transition — Once that was done, we told them that we’d just observe them using the app to make payments and when they were ready and told us that they were, we’d ask them a few questions about iK Vend.

Interview — After observing them, we would write down questions to ask. And when they were ready we would ask those questions and offer any help they needed concerning iK Vend.

Wrap up — When we were done, we’d let them know and answer any questions they had about iK Vend. We’d also discuss what we saw and how we could help.

Problems that I encountered during the session and how I solved them

1. Vendors started telling us about other problems they experienced in the app — I dealt with this by taking note of it and promised them that I would address these in a later session and brought their focus back to the problem at hand by letting them know that right now, if we fixed the iK Vend issue, they could immediately make more money.
2. Vendors didn’t understand what the big deal about iK Vend was — The marketing campaign wasn’t clear about how much money vendors could make. Once I showed them the exact amount, in the app, they were much more willing to participate and were far more helpful.
3. I found myself tempted to bias the vendor — When priming, I found myself thinking of how I could explain what the problem might be. In my head, I’d say,”Maybe you’re not using Vend because of you…” And when I realised that I would be putting putting words in their mouths I stopped, didn’t say anything and was as objective as possible by stating why we were there.

What we learned…

Typically, during the sessions, we found ourselves repeatedly asking why they were not asking customers if they wanted to buy airtime, data or any other related service. And when customers did ask to buy these things, their answer was almost always the same.

All 6 vendors had no idea where, in the app, iK Vend was. They had no idea how or where to find it.

All vendors complained about 3 main problems:

1. The Vend feature was not immediately noticeable. When users pulled up the menu, it was nowhere to be seen.
2. Vendors tried to look for it often, but it was buried deep in the Sell tab, many taps into the app.
3. Because of the way they used the app, they often did not have time to go looking for the feature as they would have a queue of customers waiting.

The problem was simple: discoverability. We had to make iK Vend much, much easier to find.

It was also evident that when we showed vendors where the feature was, they were really excited to use it and brought in more money.

Designing and Prototyping a Solution

The key was to simplify and shorten the journey to iK Vend. This would raise it’s discoverability which meant that more users could see and use it.

New user journey

After the auditing the current UI, I realised that the key to shortening the journey was to re work the main menu screen.

I shortened the journey from 5 to 2 taps to get to Vend by placing the Vend feature in the main menu and visually making the tabs shorter and more intuitive.

Before

After

Here’s how I changed the UI:

1. Introduced icons to set each tab apart more distinctly.
2. Brought Vend into the main menu and re named the menu tabs more intuitively, so users could get to Vend quicker thus shortening the user journey.
3. Inserted badges to bring more visual attention to previously unused features like Vend and Cash Advance.
4. Added a second line of explainer text that gives users more information about features and where they will go with the navigation.
5. Included toggles so users could activate the most commonly used features quickly and easily.

Prototyping and testing

I turned this screen into a clickable prototype with Sketch + Invision and tested it internally with our sales team, who loved it. We then took the prototype out to the nearest vendor and conducted a usability test, and the vendor was very happy with the new design.

As we were time constrained and the testing went well, I felt ready to put the new menu into production and look at what the results were.

The results rolled in

We used Firebase analytics to see what effect the new menu would have on Vend and the results surprised us

We could clearly see that in the first 30 days of the release engagement was up by 75% and revenue was up by 68%

These results encouraged me to push for an app wide redesign based on wider user research and more informed user journeys, which would result in happier and wealthier iKhokha users.