Executive Summary
Our founders learned that Chit Funds(Group Savings) are still managed using pen, paper and excel. Despite our customer app, the formen(Fund managers) were struggling to keep track of the fund and had to do extra work to manage it. It became evident that they needed a web portal that is linked with their fund to help them manage and do their daily activities on it.
The biggest challenge with this project was that this will be used by people who are a novice with technology, they only knew excel.
The goal was to make the experience intuitive enough that they should be able to access the most important data on a click of a button and the learning curve also had to be low. The design hence needs to make migration easy.
Market Segment:
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Chit Fund - Employees, especially Foreman(Fund managers).
Critical Success Factors:
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Users should be able to finish their tasks with minimum friction.
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Important information should be displayed clearly and quickly.
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User should be able to complete their task without any error.Lower learning curve.
Design Process
I had used Nielsen Norman's design thinking framework:
Empathise:
I went ahead and conducted interviews with Fund managers to develop deep knowledge about what they do, say, think and feel. For example, I sat with one of them to see how they list down their collection on excel and write it down in their notebook and later run formula to calculate cycles and store data.
Define:
After gathering a lot of insights from our partners I learned;
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Managers have to do a lot of hard work in book-keeping and maintaining a record.
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Their note books had a summary page which was had every members KYC details(not updated).
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Whilst their computer/mobile literacy was below average, they knew excel very well.
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It took them approximately 15-20 minutes to update their records if a customer made a payment.
Ideate:
I brainstormed a range of crazy, creative ideas that address the unmet user needs identified in the define phase. Sticky notes usually helps with crazy ideation.
Prototype > Test > Implement
We had to ship it soon, so I had little time to Prototype and test, instead we decided to gowith MVP version and ship to see it in real time.
After logging in the fund manager gets an overview of
Important details that they need to updated on
daily basis like:
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Total collection from groups
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Total borrowed amount
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Commission earned (Highlighted, as this was essential
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Dividend distributed(Highlighted, as this was essential)
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Amount undistributed
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Amount outstanding
Result:
This format reduced their daily data gathering time significantly. Before they had to open excel and notebook.
On the right hand side its been detailed and made more group centric, as we had found out from Empathise phase:
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Pie chart showing their total assets under management that is split into all the different types of assets/groups, when selected they can see further details related to that group.
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Tab based navigation to help them navigate within that section.
Result:
Interactive infographic based design helped them filter their Assets according to their requirement and get the important information. I did many iterations of this, but I learned, it was a pie chart that they understood the best.
Customer profile page, where the fund manager/foreman can view all the details, upload and edit information accordingly.
A risk score UI I designed to help fund managers understand their customer. This was MVP hence its just a dial without detailed number.
Invite screen for Fund managers to invite members to new groups using the portal. All they have to do is put in their Email Id or Phone number.
Before, they had to find the number from excel or notebook and call them up or WhatsApp them.
Takeway
There was a learning curve involved with our users but with testing and iterative designing, we were able to create a product that gives the partner chit fund access to information very easily.
Although our users were able to complete tasks with ease, the adaption however, was slow as few of our partners complained that it doesn’t have tally-esque balance sheet/accounting. We fixed it and that helped improve the conversion.