Crafting key user flows at KhaziFarm Track
KhaziFarm Track is a Finance startup aiming to provide greater financial inclusion to rural farmers in South Africa.
Role
Freelance UIUX Designer
Team
Banqobile Buthelezi
Duration
A week (January 2025)
I was approached by a South African Early stage Fin-tech startup
One of the founders of KhaziFarm Track, a South African early stage financial services startup, to design their most critical user flows for the upcoming app and investor pitch. Their app aims to provide financial services to underserved rural and underprivileged small-scale farmers. Due to the upcoming pitch, I had to design under a tight timeline.
This app would provide:
Designing an app for the the financially underserved
Before I started designing, I sought to understand the users and their needs. Due to the short time frame, I still had to keep the user research lighter, so I chose to create a user persona.
This is what I found:
Financial literacy
Many rural and poor farmers have limited access to financial services and knowledge.
Financial volatility
Unexpected circumstances like animal sickness or poor harvests make finances more unstable.
Better quality of life
Want to save money to invest in things that will elevate their quality of life and comfort.
Meet Thabo
Thabo is a farmer living in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, who uses cattle and small-scale farming to provide for his family.
Components and asset library
Final Designs
KhaziFarm Track offers several different financial services from fixed-term savings account, flexible savings accounts and different investment and stock options. In order to make it understandable for users, I had to sort and display these different financial services in a way that can be easily understood and where the user can recognise the difference between them.
To this effect, I decided to make the flexible savings account goal based as farmers depositing in a flexible savings account are likely saving with a specific shorter term future purchase in mind, and hence do not want their money locked in for a set time period in case priorities shift or an opportunity arises. I show these first by default due to them being the most liquid account and therefore, the account the farmer is likely to interact with the most often.
For the fixed-term savings account, I focused on highlighting the interest rate so farmers can see the rate that their funds would grow in real-time. This is particularly important as the interest rate is its key value proposition, being higher than that of the flexible savings accounts.
I did not make fixed saving goal-based by default due to often being used for more abstract and long term future needs.
I chose to highlight the interest and earnings in monetary terms (+R12.00) to make it more concrete and easy to understand. This is important due to the variety in levels of education in the target user group (poor and underprivileged farmers) and thus simplifying complicated financial information would be key.
Additionally, by highlighting their progress in saving, I hoped to encourage users to keep on growing their savings.
Research has shown that people naturally compartmentalise money based on its intended purpose, and has shown that integrating mental accounting into saving behaviour results in greater savings.
With this in mind, I created goals to allow users to turn the abstract fungible pool of money our brains cannot mentally account for with ease, into several more specific saving goals that are easier for users to mentally account for.
I also leaned on visual design for saving goals so users could see their saving progress at a glance as the card fills up. They would also be able to set a monthly deposit goal for the set goal, so they can steadily deposit towards meeting their goals.
This is to increase the chance of users not just creating a saving goal, but steadily meeting and planning towards it.
Link to study: https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/consumer-insights/this-is-your-brain-on-money
I linked articles and community forums together into a shared section with unified search so that the user, if seeking financial information can access all the financial resources available from a single search. I did this because users engage with both forums and articles to fulfil the same purpose of accessing financial information. As such, it made sense to put them together despite being different forms of financial resources.
This makes a gap on one side not as impactful when a user is seeking important or helpful information, as missing information from one can be substituted from the other. This further increases the access to financial resources for the users.
Due to the unified financial resource section, I also created a filter to allow the user to look for resources by source, topic, popularity or date. This is aimed to provide greater ease when looking for something specific even with the greater pool.
Lastly I chose to go for a forum card style that gives a preview of answers given to encourage the user to engage by seeing some of the most popular answers .
Demo video
Reflection
What did I learn?
First freelance experience, how to work with and build trust with international clients.
The initial planning and research stage is indispensible, even with projects with a tight deadline like this one.
Typography has an incredible impact on how polished and professional a design is.
AI is an indispensible tool for creating consistent graphics, especially when dealing with a short project like this one.
Next steps
May work with them on a full app design once they have secured funding.
Create the goal creation and management flow.
Design interfaces and flows for the other main navigation pages (wallet, learn, community and support)
Further iron out filter and search function, along with the action buttons to align with user needs and KhaziFarm Track offerings.
Impact @KhaziFarm Track
"I couldn't be more impressed with the level of professionalism, dedication, and customer service Vimbainashe Mushayikwa provided throughout the project. His prompt communication, attention to detail, and willingness to accommodate changes made the entire experience seamless and enjoyable.
I wholeheartedly recommend his services to anyone looking for top-tier work and outstanding client care."
Banqobile Buthelezi
Co-Founder @KhaziFarm Track
Next Case Study
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