UX for Business Strategy
On June 10th, UX Kitchen community Nairobi was honoured to represent Kenya at the 24 hours of UX . This was a phenomenal event packed with great UX insights from grass-root UX communities all over the world & notable keynotes was the cherry on top.
Rajay Shah & I selected the topic seeing as in these virtual times, you could literally learn how to make banana bread on youtube and sell it on Jikoni eats. Also seeing as the pandemic has significantly affected income, folks as more open to entrepreneurship. So then how do we do this right with UX right in the middle instead of being an after-thought?
To demonstrate why UX is foundational for business strategy, we used the 7 factors that influence UX as guided by the Interaction Design Foundation. These advise that a product/service needs to be Accessible, Findable, Valuable, Credible, Desirable, Useful & Usable. (Acronym attempt — Anne found very credible developers U2 :)
Also, what better example to use if not our very own M-pesa :P
A lil bit about M-pesa, it’s a mobile money service that operates on the Safaricom mobile network hence lives on your sim card. This means that you can use M-pesa on a feature phone and you don’t need internet for the service. It was launched in 2007 and is the main tool for peer to peer sending of money in Kenya. Fun fact; it was initially set up to disburse and collect micro-finance loans but showed that guys used it more for sending each other money.
Now to our first factor of UX ‘Accessible’ — The simplicity of the M-Pesa service helps to accommodate persons that are disabled to some respect. There’s been cases of visually impaired persons operating as M-pesa agents as you can see here. Accessibility altogether is still an ongoing conversation in design community locally. Safaricom launched an interactive voice platform by dialling 234 to help the visually impaired securely check for balance with more efforts ongoing. It’s worthy mentioning that designing for accessibility integrates even more simplicity to your product by default.
As for findability, since M-pesa lives on the sim card .. my grandma can find it, so she’s gonna use it. Once you identify your target market, remove barriers that might make your product hard to find. Mpesa has a cash-out system where a network of trained agents are easy to find across the country. They’re at 400,000 agents in the countries they operate. This means even in the rural areas.. withdrawing money someone has sent to your phone is not a big hassle.
M-pesa lives on the Safaricom network hence was easy to gain trust from customers. Safaricom is the most popular mobile network down here and provides quality service. You also want to build in the aspect of trust for your business. I f you’re just starting out, you could partner with brands that have already built their name or leverage on good old influencer marketing. Building a product that works, looks & feels great is also the number one key thing for trust.
For desirability, since M-pesa lives on the sim & for feature phones there’s not much of an interface.. it might not be the best example for this one. However the obviousness in labelling of features e.g. ‘send money’ definitely helps to reduce cognitive load. A good example for desirability though is the CBA Loop app that was launched to appeal to the youth and that it did. The colours, flow and general look & feel are great and we the youth do love pretty products right? Well they gotta work but looking good sure does help. The app picked up really well as you can imagine. Cleaning up interfaces & having consistency on design patterns automatically makes them look good. Same goes for the service, a happy decluttered environment will want to make a customer stop by just to see what you’re selling.
As for useful, here are some interesting stats for M-pesa. The service moves over 15 million KSH in a minute and disburses 2 mobile loans per second. Wild right? If your service/product meets a validated need.. there’s a good chance it’ll succeed. Its really that simple.
Usable’… in 5 quick steps that take 3–5 seconds each I am able to send money. If your user has to fight to get to the feature they need most and while at it struggles with navigation… you’re eventually going to lose them to your more usable competitor if not immediately.
I intentionally saved ‘valuable’ for last coz it’s got some gems sis. Your offering has to provide some value of sorts to the business, user and even society at large for emotional buy-in. It also best with a 99.9% uptime .. so it gotta work all the time. Now with the numbers provided earlier.. in the rare case that M-pesa goes down for even just 30 minutes.. for me the user paying at a restaurant gets embarrassed if all I carried was my phone. SO they lose me as a customer next time coz I’ll be damned if I don’t carry my bank cards. Now what this means for the business is a loss of transaction profits from moving approximately $4.5M in 30 minutes. Again ..wild. Money aside, M-pesa has brought to Safaricom product stickiness and that is gold. Even if I use another mobile service .. I always kept a Safaricom sim for when I need M-pesa. now that’s value. In 2018 31.2% of revenues for Safaricom came from M-pesa.. that was in the trillions of shillings, again.. wild! As for value to the society, M-pesa has more than trippled financial inclusion in Kenya from 2006–2019 from 27–83%. Wild! From this we can see that doubling down on the value your offering presents.. is a more sustainable plan than insane marketing budgets. Right?
Now look at all these facts and tell me UX is not everything?
Now to show you how to integrate UX into business strategy in addition to the factors above.
Raj part..
As UXers we need to understand that it upon us to design for the business as well. Talk to the users, make sense of the data and then design for business and that way we’ll build more sustainably. As for SMEs & corporates, INVEST IN A UXer… they are the superhero. I promise it’s absolutely worth it. And a better decision that heavy advertising.
To close this off we have a last fave local good UX example, Mulberry cocktails to go. Since we can’t hang out for cocktails with our friends like pre-Corona.. they made it possible to order a bottle of your favourite cocktail to enjoy from home. The packaging is so dope and comes with a message to tell you they miss you and that buying from them is a gift to yourself. The extra ingredients also come in a cute envelope. When ‘unboxing’ you immediately feel like this was a worthy spend.. and that you are indeed missed. See images below.. emotional buy-in right there.
Read part 2 here.
You can reach us on:
sheidynjiiri@gmail.com
rjyshah@gmail.com
uxkitchenke@gmail.com
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Until next time, stay safe & do good UX work :)
Prepared by Njiiri & Rajay Shah
