Microcred

UX Design Manager @R/GA

Paris, France
2017
PERM
TL;DR

I was the manager of the Design team (2 people) in charge of the digital tools and services used by the staff (mobile app for sales reps, desktop app for account managers, etc.).

Overview

Baobab is a financial services group with operations in eight countries on the African continent and one province of China. Via its subsidiaries,

Baobab provides financial services to half a million small businesses, fulfilling its mission of broadening access to finance among those underserved by traditional banks.

Our global range of products includes micro-loans, savings solutions, transaction and daily banking services as well as innovative banking products like mobile payments, buy-now-pay later plans and digital nano loans.

Role & responsibilities
I've joined the organization as the manager of the design team. I was based in Paris and directly managed two junior designers who were based in Dakar, Senegal.

I defined the MVP roadmap and features in collaboration with Operations, Business Analysts, Product Owners, and Developers, making ensuring that business objectives matched consumer needs.

I conducted internal interviews and focus groups with stakeholders to better understand their needs and frustrations. I then created processes and solutions to improve the efficiency of our workflow and make it easier to hand over work to developers.

I started holding daily stand-up meetings and design criticism sessions, which have enhanced cross-functional team collaboration.

Skills

Rapid prototyping
User research
Wireframes
Mockup
Component libraries

Tools

Sketch
Adobe XD
Google Suite

User research and testing in the field

Setting up ongoing user research and testing sessions was a crucial component of my work because we wanted to investigate and evaluate various hypotheses.

My team in Dakar was operating in 'guerrilla mode' on the ground, routinely visiting clients, doing quick interviews in the city and getting input from agency employees.

In addition, I constructed an Invision prototype and organized semi-moderated testing sessions with 12 clients. I had the chance to flew to Senegal and Magascar to meet and observe our customers on their daily life.

We’ve tested our prototype with customers in Senegal and Madagascar

We gave users tasks to do with the prototype and watched how they interacted with it.

The majority of consumers' reluctance to communicate their emotions, together with some of them's lack of tech-savvy or English or French language proficiency, presented an important challenge.

We've learned a lot. For example, we've made the primary navigation more apparent by using colors like orange for loans because color is essential for clients who can't read.

Iterations of the Baobab mobile menu Here is an illustration of an animated prototype created with Principle that we used throughout the user testing session. Users interact with the prototype more easily when animations and micro interactions are created.

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