Balancing design craft and speed at Kenyan startup Lynk
In the uncertainty of a startup situation, speed of design delivery is key — some insights from the Fjord Copenhagen team
Nairobi is a fascinating place. On one hand, it’s a city with surprisingly fast mobile Internet (much faster than 4G in Denmark), practically the birthplace of mobile money transfer with MPESA, and a healthy startup culture, drawing global expat talent and numerous startup incubators, with iHub leading the way since 2010.
On the other hand, it’s a city that deals with high inequality, unemployment, and a big market for informal workers or Fundis (Swahili for handyman). A lot of furniture making and selling happens on the side of the Ngong road. Here, Fundis are ready to custom build anything from chairs to beds and sofas. At the other end of the scale there are very expensive high end luxury furniture boutiques.
In this space, the two year-old Nairobi startup Lynk successfully bridges the gap between thousands of Kenyan consumers and informal workers for whatever job they need done (sort of TaskRabbit meets Etsy). The jobs range from furniture makers and carpenters, to drivers, hair dressers and chefs.
Backed by Accenture Development Partnerships, we went on a Kenyan adventure with Accenture Strategy to help Lynk with designing a go-to-market strategy and a prototype for a new service.
Designing for startups
Having spent three and a half years as a startup founder, I have learned the hard way that speed is key to minimizing risk. Unfortunately in my startup, we based a few important strategic decisions on assumptions without testing them early on. Eventually the startup failed because our assumptions were wrong, and it became too costly to make the necessary changes.
These learnings were expensive, but have also become the main drivers for the way I work with design and innovation today. While I am obsessed with quality of design, I am always pushing to design prototypes faster and validate assumption earlier on the projects I am involved in.
The design challenge
For Lynk, creating the connection between customers and workers requires a lot of manual operational effort, which makes it difficult for Lynk to scale its current services. To improve scalability, Lynk needed to expand its offering by building a platform where customers can get inspired and buy pre-designed furniture and various services, offered by Kenyan artisans and workers and presented in a more visually inspiring shopping experience.
The challenge for LYNK was understanding exactly how to design the right experience for both their current and potential customers, and how to define a go-to-market strategy to support this experience on a strategic and operational level.
To solve this challenge we leveraged the strength of the Accenture Strategy and Fjord collaboration. This boiled down to bringing both a market and user perspective to understanding the full picture from a high-level business perspective and a detailed customer angle.
Understanding Kenyan customers
With only seven days in Nairobi on of a six-week project, we were forced to squeeze our design research into a very condensed schedule process ranging from guerilla research, customer and stakeholder interviews and a Rumble workshop.
From talking to workers and customers, and running a Rumble (Fjord’s intense two-day workshop methodology) with a mix of customers, the Lynk team and stakeholders, we learned that everything from the furniture manufacturing process to the shopping and delivery experience is very different from what we are used to in the western world.
Some of the main customer challenges we found included:
- Lack of trust in artisans and workers
- Lack of transparency in production and delivery time
- Inconsistent quality
- Difficulty to manage expectations with workers — what you get can be very different than what you ask for
- Variable pricing depending on who you are
- Lack of quality assurance
Four prototypes and three tests in three weeks
With a bag full of insights, concepts and design principles, we returned to Copenhagen to build the actual service experience during the final three weeks of the project.
We ended up designing four versions of the prototype and running three tests in the final three weeks of the project. This kind of a timeframe obviously puts a lot of pressure on us as designers in our efforts to deliver high quality user experiences, but also creates an intense energy to push us further.
During the design process, we were able to test assumptions with strategic and operational impact that have specific importance to both Kenyan and expat customers.
The test results led to key decisions around:
- Product selection and curation
- Level of photo quality
- How to build trust on the platform
- Importance of product quality
- How to create more transparency in the purchasing process
- Importance of customer service and return policy
- How to combine the two LYNK platforms in one experience
“It was great to get our customers more involved in designing solutions. Its something we always want to do, but don’t always know how best to do it. I liked how Fjord kept returning to the customers after each step, to validate or to challenge our assumptions.”
Chris Maclay, Head of Growth, Lynk
Although our work was just the starting point of Lynks new service, our design process helped the Lynk team understand their customers better and realize the value design can have when navigating uncertainty.
As a result, Lynk has decided to strengthen their design capabilities by hiring more designers and they are currently working on implementing the new service to launch their improved site in the spring.
Key takeaways
- In a market situation of high uncertainty, speed is key. Experiment, test your assumptions, learn, measure, iterate. Methodologies like Design Thinking, Google sprints and Lean Startup are great.
- Beautiful design and a quality customer experience requires strong craft designers. The end results of a speedy process is dependent on strong design talent.
- Ultimately the tight timeframe of experiments help us lower risk, as it brings down the time from assumptions to testing with actual customers. If the assumptions are wrong, we can quickly adjust the design based on the new findings.
Illustrations by Daniel Fernandez
