Project

Tabtap SHOP: UX Research and UX/UI Design Case Study

Redesigning the book-keeping experience for small and micro businesses in 3 African cities; Lagos, Abidjan and Lilongwe.

Date

August 2021

Role

Lead Designer

Company

Groots Consulting UG

The Challenge

In 2021, Groots had just finished an offline marketing and distribution campaign for their Book-keeping mobile app – tabtap SHOP.

Target market: Neighbourhood stores or micro and small businesses in 3 African cities: Lagos (Nigeria), Abidjan(Cote d'Ivoire) and Lilongwe (Malawi).

We had spent some $$$ on offline marketing and distribution of the mobile app, but retention was still very low despite the fast adoption and offline activation we witnessed during onboarding.

The Objective

Research - Find out why customer retention was low.
Design and develop data-driven solutions for the identified problem(s).
Goal - Increase retention by ≥30% on the current version.

The Approach

We adopted the double-diamond approach. However, we streamlined it into three phases namely:

Empathize
Conceptualize and,
Design

1. Empathize

We knew the problem was low retention, but we needed to find out the root cause of the problem. In order to understand this, we needed to really dive deep into the user’s pains, JTBD, needs, expectations and aspirations. Some of the questions we asked were:

At what point in the customer journey do users drop off?
What are the reasons for dropping off vs. their initial reasons for downloading the app?
What are their current frustrations and pain points?
What are the goals, needs, wants and expectations of our users that our app is not addressing?

I led a 2-week extensive User Research sprint in 3 cities.

Conducted an F2F interview with 100+ users (shop owners) in 3 cities; Lagos, Abidjan and Lilongwe.
Held a Group discussion of 20+ users (shop owners) in Lagos.
Collated all existing user feedback from our FB and WhatsApp groups.
Collated, analyzed and presented research insights and reports to key stakeholders.
Collaborated in strategic design thinking sessions to ideate solutions to identified user needs from our research efforts.

Key Takeaways

Bookkeeping alone is not enough value to use the app. Shop owners want more control and flexibility in the app.
Shop owners expect the shop numbers e.g. Total sales, stock count etc. to tally with actual shop realities.
Generally, shop owners lack access to capital or quick credit to finance their business
The Hybrid and Wholesalers shop category understand the importance of Book-keeping
The Hybrid and Wholesalers have more than 1 shop and so they have shop assistants (paid/unpaid)
Shop owners’ ultimate goal/aspiration is business growth.

Solution

2. Conceptualize

At this point we were overwhelmed with insights, we needed to start prioritizing them to form ideas and strategies. So we held group sessions to:

Classify and group all insights gathered across channels.
Formulate our product strategies and ideas.

The outcome:

We created an Affinity map to understand the recurrent themes.
Designed a user persona: Mrs Joy Otedola, and shared it with the team, to form our POV.
Created an Empathy map for our user persona.
Present the analysis, insights, and ideas to key stakeholders to get buy-in.

One key insight that crystallized after several team sessions were the fact that we needed to focus on the Hybrid and Wholesaler shop category. This is because they understand the importance of bookkeeping and want more control and flexibility in the app.

We came up with several ideas to solve all the HMW questions we generated. The image below shows the top feature ideas and themes that came up.

Prioritization

We were on a tight deadline, we had come up with multiple new feature ideas that we believe would solve shop owners’ problems, ease their pains and bring them delight. However, we needed to answer the question:

What features should we build first in this sprint and which one comes later?

For this, we adopted this prioritization matrix in our decision-making process and it helped us see clearly the feature we could build immediately to turn the trend around and what to prioritize for later.