How might we design a mobile app product that makes Growsari Tinderas’ process of capturing & replenishing cash-on-hand visible, trackable, & accommodating, so that their stores can become successful Community ATMs

Project Duration

Jan. 31 - Feb. 11 (2 weeks)

My Responsibilities

UX Design, Visual Design, UX Research

The team

Denise Dizon, Kathleen Bernabe,
Matthew Cruz, Reinard Carranceja (ME)

Growsari and the problem of how can they enable sari-sari stores to become cash-out points in their communities.

Sari-sari stores that do these “cash out” services do not always have enough cash on hand. Growsari needs to know how much cash a store has on hand at the start of the day, and if low on cash, they’d route shippers to them. Our objectives in this research are to:

Identify how tinderas manage their cash-on hand for the cash-out service

Identify how tinderas use and manage their Growcoins

Determine external factors that affect the tinderas’ cash on hand

Who are our Growsari Tinderas?

Growsari tinderas offers mobile load, bills payment, & cash-in/cash-out, are well-versed in GrowSari features, particularly GrowCoins & E-Negosyo and actively manages their sari-sari store operations, particularly cash flow.

To understand the behavior of GrowSari Tinderas in managing their cash-on-hand for their cash-out service we conducted 6 user interviews. From those interviews we created two seperate personas, the Business Tindera and the Try Muna Tindera.

Beth, the Business Tindera

These are sari-sari store owners that has over 2 years of experience in managing a sari-sari store.

Beth's frustrations

Manages the store alone so she can’t track
her cash-on-hand on her notebook
Shippers can’t always accomodate her schedule
Has lots of competitors within her community

Tessie, the Try Muna Tindera

These are sari-sari store owners that has less than 2 years of experience or are still starting in managing a sari-sari store.

Tessie's frustrations

Needs more capital
Uses in-store money whenever she falls short on every day expenses
Finds the Growsari app slightly difficult to learn so she takes her time to use it.
Wants to provide a cash-out service but she doesn’t know how to manage it since she’s always out of cash

What we got from our interviews?

The aim of the interviews is to know more about their sari-sari store, to know how do they use Growsari, to figure out the flow of their current cash-out service, and lastly, how do they handle their cash-on hand.

These are the key insight we got from those interviews:

All Tinderas get their initial capital cash-on-hand from their family savings as they are stay-at-home moms, taking care of children.

Tinderas record their transactions nightly in a physical notebook, categorized by item & day.

Tinderas allot cash-on-hand mainly for store goods, paying E-Lista bills, topping up GrowCoins, and offering cash-outs.

Tinderas replenish cash on hand primarily through the selling of high-demand sari-sari store items & cash-in transactions.

Tinderas are skeptical about their profit in cash-out service.
They are more comfortable in accommodating cash-ins due to frequent customer demand.

Tinderas primarily use Growcoins for loading, top-ups, customer cash-ins, & E-Negosyo services because of exclusive rebates.
They only use GCash as backup.

What is our solutions?

Opportunities

Learning from our uses, these are the opportunities we see, that we can solve using our proposed system and prototype

Encourage tinderas to invest only what they’re willing to invest and cycle through the cash-out service.

Transactions involving Growcoins can be used to determine how much tinderas need for a cash infusion.

Maximize the utility of Growcoins
through various services

The cash-out service can be marketed as a service tinderas can “invest” in to cycle their money faster.

Planning our design

With the opportunities in mind, we ideate features that we can include in our prototype, from this we came up with three main features, these are the cash-out service, cash infusion, and the pahiram puhunan.

With all the features planned out, we created user flows for each functionality

🛈 Detailed user flow will be shown along with the refined design

Starting the design

The main deliverable for this project is to create a low-fidelity prototype, so we create drafts of our proposed features.

Below are the screens of different functionalities of our mobile prototype, alongside the detailed user flow for each functionality.

Cash out service

Pahiram Puhunan

Cash infusion

Try it yourself!

Experience our mobile solution by accessing the Figma prototype below. Go full screen to see the full mobile prototype.

What is our plan in testing this?

One of the deliverable in this project is to create a testing plan for our proposed prototype.

Goal of our testing plan

To determine the effectiveness of the new suggested features work as intended, we want to know whether the users understand the concept of the new design features. Additionally, we also wanted to know whether the use of new words such as ‘Pahiram Puhunan’, ‘Cash Out Wallet’, ‘Cash-on-hand Delivery’ was clearly understood by our users.

Test Objectives

Do tinderas understand the value of having a separate wallet (cash-out wallet) in managing their tindahan budget?

Do the onboarding screens help the tinderas to proceed with the cash-out services and pahiram puhunan feature?

Do tinderas understand the value of Pahiram Puhunan?

Do tinderas understand how to get cash-on-hand using their current cash-out wallet Growcoins?

Do tinderas understand how to do cash-outs within the Growsari app?

Conducting the test

Testing Method

Moderated & Informal Usability Test

Participants

10 GrowSari tinderas

Success Metrics

Effectiveness and System Usability Scale

Task scenarios

Tasks scenarios to use when conducting the actual testing

Main Task 1: Successfully get cash-on-hand from Pahiram Puhunan & track the arrival of your cash-on-hand

Main Task 2: Do a successful cash-out transaction & check their recent cash-out transaction in the transaction history.

Main Task 3: Do a successful cash-on-hand delivery to your doorstep.

LEARNINGS AND NEXT STEPS

Next Steps

Conduct the testing plan & consolidate feedback from users & businesses

Test and gather insights using our proposed testing plan

Iterate designs and flows as needed.

Iterate design from user feedback that comes from the usability tests

Collaborate with Growsari content creators in explaining the cash out service & Pahiram Puhunan to the other tinderas

Given that some Growsari tinderas started using Growsari after they watched vlogs, we should used this to explain the next system to them

Learnings and takeways

Different projects, different deliverables

After the project was announced, I anticipated that we will make another high-fidelity prototype. But after being given the brief of the project, I learned that this project is more research-focused and we will not be making high-fidelity prototypes. Honestly within the first days, I am not excited working on the project, but after a couple of days I understand that there are times that research is more needed than a fully functional prototype.

Read the brief again and again and again ...

The most time we spent on this project is understanding what the client wants. We have different views of what are solution will be, but after reading the brief and understanding it really well, we came up with a solution that we all agreed upon.

Plan first, ask questions later

Our recruitment in this project goes well, we almost have over 100+ respondents in the survey we first give, from those respondents we get our interviewees. But after conducting our very first interview, we notice that some of the questions we made is not aligned with our goal. This pushes us behind in our schedule, so we made another round of interviews and making the survey we made not very helpful in our research.

Turning Sari-sari Stores into Community ATMs