OZÉ — Empowering Ghanians to grow their ventures
Design Brief
Vision
OZÉ is your business coach, right in your pocket, so you can track when money is coming in and leaving, all on the go. OZÉ does all the calculations for you, updating the health of your business in real-time and alerting you when necessary.
OZÉ offers a platform for small businesses and local ownership, particularly in emerging markets. By providing small businesses with the data they need to make decisions, OZÉ enables investment-readiness and a chance for a local economy to assert itself on a global stage.
Role
Over 5 weeks in Accra, Ghana, redesigned the mobile and web apps that empower small-medium enterprises to analyze their data and grow their businesses.
Conducted user interviews and field research to drive the design direction and customer experience. Goals
Build clearer ways to communicate with users through the mobile and web apps Develop user studies and meet with users ranging from new and potential customers to power users Find places to build in little moments of joy, celebration, and trust creation in the app Help all users develop habits with actionable insights Make it easy enough that any user can pick up the app intuitively
Before
Insights
- Keep capitalization, punctuation, and colors consistent throughout app
- Reduce the amount of colors and clarify what they symbolize (e.g. red for expenses and green for income)
- Create new opportunities to solidify a unique visual brand and personality throughout app (e.g. loading screen, cohesive color palette, avatars, easter eggs)
- Maintain consistency between mobile and web apps
- Create a design system to reuse components consistently in different parts of app across web and mobile (e.g. buttons, text boxes, popups)
Research
Conducting user studies with OZÉ customers and field research with street vendors
| Finding | Insight |
|---|---|
| Business owners want to focus on expanding their ventures and not deal with accounting and bookkeeping. Users have a hard time maintaining a habit of recording transactions (accounting is the first responsibility to drop off when busy) | Make it as easy and simple as possible to record transactions and notify users on a regular basis |
| Most users want to understand and keep track of the basics - e.g. how much money is in their account, how much they made in the last month, and how quickly their businesses are expanding | Visualize and distill the most important metrics on the dashboard |
| Users enjoyed the in-app coaching tips that helped them learn more about their data and other features in the platform | Help users learn about the features within the app with walk-thrus and insights |
| Users mostly rely on the mobile app to manage transactions on the go | Design for mobile first |
| Many users are still learning how to integrate technology into their businesses | Reduce the cognitive overhead and Western-centric archetypes and hyperlocalize to the Ghanaian market and user base |
Wireframing
Reflection
Result
- Apps are now live on the Android and iOS app stores and with 4+ ratings reaching thousands of users
Next Steps
- Continue to refine design system and conduct further usability studies and testing to uncover biases and pain points for local users in Ghana and in the region
- Localize the content and experience (e.g. visuals, mental models, verbage)
- Small business owners want to focus on growing their businesses and the platform should seamlessly work in the background and empower them to do their best work
Learnings
- Never enough user research and opportunities for user validation, but there is also a tradeoff between trying to design for every single user that encompass all backgrounds and life experiences and completing an iteration of the design
- Design in lower fidelity mockups first, and focusing on information architecture and user flows before diving into designing components and visualization
- Don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time - iterate on what users are used to and what works