OVERVIEW

What is Gravity

Gravity helps micro & small retail businesses access finance by enabling them to set up a financial profile that they can use to apply for business loans. These profiles allow lenders to improve the credit scoring/assessment of merchants and thus lower the interest rates.

The Problem

To further improve access to capital for merchants by finding possibilities to lower interest rates even more, Gravity wanted to explore non-traditional sources of lending capital such as decentralized finance.

Users & Audience

Users are individuals or institutions that would like to contribute funds to a liquidity pool for a certain period of time and earn interest.

Roles & Responsibilities

There were 3 people in the team. One developer, a product designer (me) and the founder. I was responsible for designing the UI and UX of the investment app from scratch.

Scope & Constraints

We had a time constraint of 3 days to complete the boot camp task. Out of which 1 day was foreseen for the prototyping.

Process

Kick-Off

The team started with determining long-term goals and metrics that will be achieved with the Gravity investment app and brainstormed on pain points (How-might-we = HMW) that could arise in the implementation and user journey of this solution. Once this had been gathered the design sprint was kicked off where I played the leading role. The 4 steps of the design sprint were: Map, sketch, decide, prototype.

Mapping Phase

During the mapping phase I set up the user journey/sequence flow while circling back with the developer to ensure that the implementation was technically feasible and I incorporated the “How-might-we” (HMW) pain points the team had raised.After I had presented the user journey to the team, all members drafted individual storyboards and shared them with me. The story boards were collages of visual inspiration and memorable sentences/copy from apps or websites that offer a similar solution. From this I was able to get a clear understanding of what the team’s vision for the design, the look and feel as well as the mood of the app was. In addition, the team decided to demo the first part of the user journey. Which is how a user can contribute lending capital.

Sketching & Designing

During the sketching and deciding phase I used the visual inspiration and information that I got during the storyboarding session to sketch the flow of the user experience.Due to the time constraint which meant I only had 1 day to build, I made sure the sketch was as detailed as possible so that all decisions were already made and the exact flow confirmed with the team before I started working on the prototypes.

Outcome & Learnings

• We designed a new product for a new user group
• First feedback on the prototypes from colleagues who weren't participating in the bootcamp was positive (design is simple and straightforward)
• With the prototypes I designed we are ready to carry out user testing
• Challenges rather on the business side of things: is the cost of funds really cheaper and are transaction costs really reduced if we can only cash out in MPESA?

Gravity X Stellar

design sprint & Prototyping

OVERVIEW

Process

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