Kainene, a freelance product designer based in Lagos, Nigeria, very passionate about design and very keen on becoming world class in his small self-contained apartment in Ogba, Lagos. Years after grinding and documenting his growth and sharing it on LinkedIn and twitter, he finally got an international gig that would pay in dollars, U.S Dollars! Taking on the gig is not the problem, but a payment platform with a good exchange rate, payment security and swift transaction was the problem. Then I came up with a name “nata” which means “to accept”.
Cover Design
This is an assessment of which I needed to show my strength as a product designer, so I was in charge of the project from start to finish. I did the following: -designing of the app’s logo -UX research(Conducting survey, Users’ interview, Competitive analysis) -UX writing -user-flow diagram -information architecture -sketching -low and high-fidelity prototypes -usability testing. -Iteration
“Freelancers have limited options to accept payments from US and Canada. This causes frustrations as these freelancers often turn down jobs they will otherwise have executed. They need a way to initiate and receive payments from their clients abroad”.
According to Pearl Buck, “If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday”. I began my design thinking process by carrying out a research on cross-border payments, platforms that offer this service and how satisfied their users are. I came across some companies that I eventually had to do a competitive analysis for. This research broadened my knowledge on cross-border payments and how best it should be done that will make its users happy. Whilst the research was still on, I took note of pointers/ideas that might be a possible solution to the problem. Some of which are shown below on the sticky notes. In summary, my design thinking process were broken into stages as shown below:
-Research: Browsing for products that have solved this problem and searching for inspirations
-Empathize: Carrying out qualitative and quantitative research to understand what the users feel.
-Define: Analyzing the data gotten from research and interviews
-Ideate: Taking note of all possible ways to solve this problem, information architecture and userflows
-Prototype: Sketching paper wireframes, userflow, creating visual details, High Fidelity designs.
-Test: Made users interact with the app to be sure it has achieved its aim.
-Iterate: This was also done when I was sketching the paper wireframes, but was predominant after testing.
My design thinking process
Summary of rough ideas gotten from the research
Deductions from my research showed that apart from accepting cross border payments, freelancers also want to:
-be able to issue invoices to their clients
-want to be able to send automatic reminder to their clients in cases of overdue invoices,
-track their receivables.
While Clients want to be able to:
-Send money from the U.S or Canada without exorbitant fees
-send money with little or no stress
-send money with no onboarding