Leveraging user research to reposition a B2B fintech product
Background
Omni Strategies is a B2B/B2C start-up in Ghana, developing and maintaining a diverse portfolio of digital products, including a B2B Fintech product I’ll be referring to as ‘Product P’ throughout this case.
Product P was Omni Strategies first attempt to pivot from providing product development services to external clients, to developing and owning products in-house.
Lead Designer
User Researcher
Engineering Manager
Product Manager
Product Owner
Product Designer
Content Designer
Software Engineers
The Problem
As our first in-house product, leadership decided on a fintech system that enabled parents to instantly pay tuition fees.
What would such a system look like?
With instant banking already available in Ghana, and schools having integrated admin systems, what would be our USP?
My Objective
Validate the user need for Product P and identify a market opportunity.
My Solution
Conduct user research, primarily:
Surveys: With over 100 guardians/parents with children/wards across Nursery, Primary, and Secondary schools - understand their experience paying fees.
Interviews: With 15 school proprietors in the Greater Accra area to understand how they handle tuition tracking and management.
Translate insights into a product vision to lead all development and business efforts.
Identify key features and design an information architecture for clarity.
Research Insights
Most parents are enthusiastic about using a digital platform to reduce friction when paying fees, if the option is provided by their school. School proprietors without digital fee payment systems want a solution to manage student fees and other financial tasks.
of guardians/parents paid fees physically at the bank to get a physical receipt.
of guardians/parents used online transfer for convenience, but had to go into the school to confirm receipt.
of guardians/parents paid cash at the school bursar to get immediate and direct confirmation of payment.
Stats — Survey with parents & guardians
schools used a combination of school management systems & manual accounting.
schools had no computerised system in place, relying on decentralised records, cash payments and manually generated receipts.
Stats — Interview with school proprietors
Recommendation
Based on the results, the product team and leadership came to the conclusion that we needed to pivot. With two main points:
Focus on B2B customers
Specifically schools lacking a digital system, with a seamless onboarding process for parents as secondary users.
Pivot holistic financial management
With payments as a core technology.
Image — Product vision before vs after research
System Design
Based on our research findings and business projections, leadership gave approval to pivot. I worked cross-functionally to understand two main areas:
Technical limitations: I collaborated closely with the engineering team to design the system and logic, understand features and map out the relationship between entities and features in the system.
Business limitations: I attended sessions with the Bank of Ghana (the regulatory body for financial institutions) to understand the limitations to our financial license, the provisions for fintech products and opportunities for integration with other financial institutions.
My Design Process
Based on the product vision, I led the design of the entire product starting from the B2B web app - for schools.
I worked with the Product manager and Product owner to create personas, identify key flows based on the user stories and design the information architecture.
User flows
I led the design team in creating user flows for the entire B2B web app.
Screenshot — Snippet from web app user flow
Information architecture
I crafted the Information architecture to identify key functions and visualise how the experience would work holistically based on my learnings from the user flow.
I maintained collaboration with engineering and business to ensure alignment with technical and business needs.
Screenshot — Product P B2B web app Information architecture
Wireframing
I opted for high fidelity wireframes to ensure design efficiency. We used wireframes to get feedback from the product team and gain technical insights from the engineering before building out final components.
This ended up being crucial because we got feedback from engineering on how the logic for tables would work and how the relationship between students and fees in the system could be represented.
I also worked extensively on some key system features in this phase like user management and student fees in relation to promotions.
Images — Wireframes for the dashboard, onboarding and student management features
Design & Prototyping
I developed early UI iterations and basic prototypes for some features using Figma & Framer to present to stakeholders.
Images — Dashboard and 'Manage admin' screens
Unveiling features through research - The Cash payment flow
In interviews, we discovered that proprietors wanted to maintain the option for parents/guardians to pay with cash at the schools.
I accounted for that in the web app experience by ensuring visibility in the navigation.
Video — Cash payment flow
Impact
Repositioned the entire product avoiding about ~$1M in business losses.
A significant step for the company’s first consumer-facing product.
Learnings
New products are goddamn complex and require a lot of flexibility across the board. One thing I learned for sure, in experience design, a little data is significantly better than no data.
