Gcash MicroMerchant App

A low-tech financial app for the Philippines market

Role

UX/UI Designer

Industry

FinTech

Duration

4 months

Client Overview

GCash is an online digital wallet that offers various transactions in the Filipino Market. To service the estimated 80% of Filipinos who remained unbanked and solve the problem, GCash ventured into innovating a new type of wallet that would serve the Filipino people (Bunye, 2022). Today, it has grown to be #1 Finance Super App based on average monthly active users in the country.

Project Overview

To expand the market and reach small peddlers and vendors in the Philippines, I plan to develop a micro-merchant app that focuses on essential features tailored to their needs. The app will provide easy access, simple onboarding, and offline and online payments support and a multilingual interface.

Roles and Scope

I had to collaborate with two business leaders, one frontend developer, one backend developer, and one business analyst. My role is to research and design the user experience and interface for this mini-app.

Methods adopted and duration.

I applied the Lean UX approach and Agile methodology, as I was the sole designer and needed to meet tight deadlines for the initial design iteration. Using Lean UX, I interviewed the business leaders and relied on secondary resources to gain user insights. Since the client had specific feature requirements, we concentrated solely on those. This approach enabled us to develop a functional app within four months.

Client Overview

Project Overview

Roles and Scope

Methods adopted and duration.

Tools used

Figma, Figjam, JIRA, Microsoft Teams, Katonic AI, Zeplin

Research and findings

I had the opportunity to engage directly with our B2B clients and customers to gain a deeper understanding of their goals, pain points and their business requirement. This gave me a head-start in the design process.

Gcash already has a customer facing app and a merchant app but this app should serve those small vendors and peddlers who just want to do simple business transactions in the most easiest way.

Some of the pain points that were identified are,

Language barriers
Limited technology knowledge
Lives in remote areas without access to the internet

The business wanted to differentiate these vendors during the onboarding and have a fare easy and quick KYC process.

Ideation

Provide a simple homepage with quick access to check balance, recent transactions and actions.
The merchants will be able to receive money through NFC, QR code and while offline without the internet.
Introducing a multi-lingual interface and chatbot support.
To reduce the time and effort involved in the KYC Process, we have opted to include Katonic AI to extract the needed information from the documents submitted. Later, a human would verify it for the final step. This will reduce the time from 14 days to a minimum of 2 days.

Final Takeaways

The app has been delivered to the client within 4 months and is now being tested and developed further. Some of the takeaways form the project were,

It is very important to work closely with developers and managers to understand the feasibility of the project.
Working in Agile and sending out small deliverables and iterating them again after testing is necessary for the success.
Accessibility is important from the start of the research.

Final Takeaways

The app has been delivered to the client within 4 months and is now being tested and developed further. Some of the takeaways form the project were,

It is very important to work closely with developers and managers to understand the feasibility of the project.
Working in Agile and sending out small deliverables and iterating them again after testing is necessary for the success.
Accessibility is important from the start of the research.