Designing mobile micro-financing for Ugandan dairy farmers

​With emata loans product launch on 5th Feb 2021, I’ve just completed an end-to-end project which started in the Spring of 2020 when I arrived in Kampala, Uganda. 

I was there to help fintech Laboremus spin-off 'emata' integrate human centred design into their mission, which is to bring digital and affordable financial products to farmers in East Africa. I was hired to help design their launch product, a micro-loan service for dairy farmers for whom getting the money to buy necessities (like vet services and cattle feed) can trap them in cycles of debt.

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Re-framing for the real world of intended users 

Over three weeks, I helped the business in Kampala understand the core principles of human centric design, and worked hands-on with the development team in the field, researching the context of use as well as farmers needs and those of the co-operatives that process and distribute their milk. I learned a lot about dairy farming in East Africa and their rather beautiful indigenous cattle !

I worked closely with a small team of developers and project managers I was asked to mentor in HCD. We crossed many bridges as I communicated ways to frame problems as human centred, and techniques to investigate people’s needs and desires. A prototype is just a testable embodiment of an idea and one of my favourite breakthroughs was showing how at the right time a carefully told story can be a far more effective and appropriate prototype than a digital click-through - strong medicine for a digital software development team! In prototyping I advocate minimal investment to achieve the desired outcome. 

I helped the team map out the service eco-system in which the product would function - and in doing so we moved thinking on from a digital farmer-centric app concept, to one which respected the complexity of the social and cultural environment in to which it was to be launched.

Key to this was recognising that emata must collaborate with the co-operatives to ensure that standing in the community and local knowledge of factors such as character and affordability were reflected in the lending process. Without this there was a very real risk that intricate checks and balances in local economies would be disrupted, loans would be unrecoverable and the system would fail.

Exploring the possibilities using remote, collaborative design tools and testing

With needs and context of use understood, an MVP (minimum viable product) concept sketched out for the KYC (Know Your Customer is an identification and authentication step required in financial services) as well as the loan application process, approval and disbursement process and with the business bought in I returned to the UK to progress the design of the way we would deliver the service, just in time for the first UK lockdown.

Working remotely with the team in Uganda, we progressed from told stories to storyboards that showed a mobile phone system concept in use. It tested well in the field, and with this feedback I designed and created a few wire-flows to get a sense of what the system might feel like (I used Sketch) . Then with the field research, as well as business and tech constraints to hand, I designed and captured the cross-channel interactions of the whole system as swim-lanes showing paper, printer, phone and face to face interactions and the hand-off between channels (I used omnigraffle) . I needed to do this to give a clear idea to all the teams involved of what we were going to prototype and eventually build. Had I been physically present in Uganda I probably would have just run a couple of white boarding workshops - but we were all in lock-down and I needed a representation of the system that could be shared and didn’t require my presence - I recorded a video to go alongside the swim-lane design concept to explain how certain features reflected the research findings.

The iterated swim lane concept allowed me to move to the design of the digital components of the system, sharing and and testing this with the team before finally creating a prototype that could be run and tested on target users phones in Uganda (I used Figma to do the design and prototyping and MIRO to run collaborative design workshops throughout the project).

I believe prototyping should reflect the minimum investment necessary to achieve the desired outcome, if a prototype is too valuable to be thrown away, it’s not a prototype - of course this mean it’s necessary to be clear about what it is you want to find out in testing. 

Testing led inevitably to some valuable simplifications and tradeoffs and a sharpening of the concept. The system as designed was realised as a simple and straightforward WhatsApp chatbot for simultaneous use by co-operative working with farmers collaboratively to agree an affordable loan on devices they owned and using an application they could access. The back end to the system uses milk-delivery information to establish credit worthiness and the front end of the system (the service described here) uses this information to support a negotiation between the co-operatives and farmers to define and apply for affordable loans.  

With the delivery of a user guide for co-operatives in early Feb 2021 and launch a few days later, my involvement in the project which was planned to last 10 weeks and in fact lasted a year, is over - it was a challenging year to keep momentum, and it forced me to take remote collaborative design by the horns and make it what I needed it to be, brilliantly the tools were there evolving alongside to help me do that.

I used this project as the basis of a MIRO mediated talk/workshop with University of West Of England (UWE) design students in December 2020, the board is here if you are interested, and there is embedded video and a Figma prototype to play with.

If you’re interested in hearing more about this or want to talk about things that are interesting you, message me!