Opportunity area:

Post-pandemic growth in small businesses drove demand for simple, flexible payments. This led to FLW SoftPOS, a solution that lets merchants accept contactless payments directly on their phones, with no extra hardware needed.

Goal:

To provide individuals and businesses with the simplest, most cost-effective, and flexible card payment acceptance solution.

My role:

I led the design efforts for this project, collaborating closely with Yemurayi Chinde (Product Manager) and Bolanle Dele (Associate Product Manager) to bring the product to life.

Our approach:

• Gaining a deep understanding of the outcomes we aimed to achieve.
• Conducting user research by speaking with merchants and customers to identify their expectations for this product.
• Creating personas which were shared with the broader team to align our strategy.
• A simple user flow to show the team how the product would work/function.

Next steps:

1. After finalizing the hi-fidelity designs, I held review sessions with product, engineering, and key stakeholders, followed by user testing in partnership with Kimoyo Insights.
2. The testing session was a mix of guided and unguided tests with 10 participants and was a success.
3. After completing user testing, I handed off to developers and worked closely with the product managers to map out a beta test with select businesses, including major supermarket chains like Spar and several small businesses.

Outcomes:

• The end-to-end development of the product took 3 months.
• The beta version was successfully launched to a select group of customers.

Takeaways

• Despite great customer feedback the product was shelved in Q1 of 2024 due to internal priorities.
• While it was disappointing that the project was shelved, the experience provided invaluable lessons, including: The importance of alignment across all teams, User research as a strategic tool and how to detach from sunk-cost fallacy.