My Interview with Cowrywise.
If you’re not familiar with Cowrywise upon reading this article, Cowrywise is a FinTech (Financial Technology) company that digitizes investment management for Africans and enables secure access to secure savings and investment products. It is licensed by the Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission as a portfolio management company. Cowrywise is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and based in Lagos State, Nigeria. In this article, I’m going to be taking you through my interview process for a role as a Product Designer with Cowrywise.
Cowrywise has great products, each product being as user-centered as they can be. Cowrywise recently put the word out that they are recruiting. I’ve been a customer at Cowrywise since 2019, so I was excited to apply for a design role at a company where I’ve been a user at over the last two years. I saw it as a great opportunity for a junior level designer like myself to gain industry experience and with a great company like Cowrywise, score! I clicked the recruitment link to check for the design roles available and apply to the one I would have been a great fit for. On opening the link, the design roles were all presumably taken seeing as I couldn’t find any design openings in the listed roles. You’re probably thinking, “Didn’t he say his interview with Cowrywise? How did he apply if there were no openings?”. Keep reading to find out. I want to keep your interests piqued.
The visual designs of Cowrywise products have always been top tier and let’s not even mention their usability, outstanding! As a product designer myself, hats off to the Cowrywise design team. Wonderful job! That said, what could there possibly be to improve in their designs? I asked myself this question and so did the interviewer. “If our products are as wonderful as you claim, why should we hire you? What would you offer the current products in terms of improvements?” I took a deep sigh, not because the question surprised or shocked me, but because I knew I was about to blow the brains of the interviewer. I was about to shock the interviewer. I was about to be unapologetically brilliant. Please note, no design is final. Every design always has room improvements. After all, the creator of the design is not perfect, so why would his/her creation be?
The main idea that I came up with was refresh button. “Refresh button? Is that all? After all the deep sighs?”. Yes, refresh button! When you choose to fund your Cowrywise account, either the stash, emergency, or the locked savings account, the process is seamless, intuitive, and efficient, with a good conversion rate. Like I said, hats off to the design team. Now comes the improvement, not the process of funding your wallet but what happens after you fund your Cowrywise account.
After funding your account, you get debited almost immediately, trust Nigerian banks not to waste time with debit notifications. Upon debit, the next thing on your mind as a customer is “It should have reflected in my wallet”. You check your wallet, but don’t see the reflection yet. “I’ve been debited, what’s wrong?”, this thought runs through your mind, you get scared. If you are familiar with the whole process of funding your Cowrywise account, you might or might not have realized that there’s like a ten to thirteen seconds interval between the debit and reflection of the fund. That time interval — or as I like to call it, “scary seconds”, is enough to cause a reasonable scare to the customer. If there’s anything to note about transactions with Nigerian banks, it’s that all sorts of mishaps can happen in the transaction channel.
The “delay” most likely does not have to do with Cowrywise, their API is probably, with an 89.9% chance — nothing/no one is perfect, working fine. The scary seconds will make a first-time customer and probably even a regular customer who isn’t aware of the interval, skeptical about the credibility of Cowrywise, which is bad user experience. A refresh button solves this issue. Based on the reason stated above, you may think “refreshing still doesn’t mean anything if the delay is from the bank”. True it doesn’t, but that’s only true to you and I in engineering/design. The customer isn’t concerned with that, all he/she wants is to see their transaction successful, as fast as possible. This means as a product designer, I want to make them feel as secure and in control as possible and remove every avenue of doubt about the product the customer could have. The refresh button helps me realize these.
By giving the user the power to refresh the page, rather than leave it all to the autonomous refresh feature, it clears every avenue the user could have to direct questions to Cowrywise, they think “the app is working, it’s probably my network or the bank’s network”, and also it makes the user feel in total control of the product. You’re giving them power and users want to have power over whatever they can. You’re giving the users assurance that they are not blocked out of the product, that they are still in control, that the product is still active. The scary seconds pass, the money reflects in your Cowrywise account, and a customer leaves the Cowrywise app satisfied, happy and powerful having completed their intended transaction with ease and absolute comfort. A simple CTA (Call-To-Action) has solved a seemingly psychological product flaw and improved considerably the experience of the user.
I kept to my word, I blew the mind of the interviewer like I said I would. The interviewer was very impressed and just like you’re probably wondering, the interviewer also wondered, “Is that the only improvement you have for the product?”. No, no it’s not. I’ll be offering more improvements after the offer e-mail comes in. Well, I haven’t received the offer email yet but that’s probably because the interview never happened. Well, it did but it happened in my own personal realm. It was a daydream, an imagination. I might have skipped that detail, oops.
That imagination/daydream did help me review the design of a platform I have used for over two years just as a customer. But who better has insight than me? A VIP customer and a designer for the same product. You could say it’s part of my design process. Every one’s design process is different but all in all you could classify this under emphatization.
Thank you very much for reading this far. This my first ever technical article and I had a good time progressing you through my thought process. Please I would appreciate your feedbacks, so please comment, applaud and share.
