Capitec Point of sale
Capitec Bank
Designing a user friendly interface for a point of sale (card machine) device that will be used by Capitec merchants and business banking clients.
Skills: User research, UX design, UI design, Prototyping
Problem Statement
South African small business owners and merchants are a vital part of the country’s economy. A challenge faced by these small businesses is the drive and increase of card payments versus cash payments. Most merchants within South Africa do not have access to POS (point-of-sale) devices or those that do are expected to pay high transaction fees. I was tasked to research the current market of POS devices and merchants, design the product and complete user testing of the product.
Design Process
Empathise
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
Research
User interviews & Observations
To gain a better understanding of the user needs I conducted interviews and observed merchants at their place of business. Merchants included local restaurants, shops, entrepreneurs who sell at markets and a variety of large and small merchants.
Key Findings
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Most merchants (without a system) uses a calculator to get the sum of products before picking up the POS device;
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Larger merchants prefer to use product sale, adding products by scanning or selecting from the system;
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Smaller merchants prefer amount sale, just adding the price of the items;
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Most merchants want the sale to happen quickly with a low margin of errors.
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When asked about their current pain points transaction fees was not mentioned as the top issue.
Competitive Analysis
Next, I wanted to understand what products are currently available in the market, specifically non-bank products as this was not the main competitors the team wanted to focus on.
Define
User Personas (Example)
Based on the user interviews, observation, desktop research and competitor analysis, it was important to define the target market for the MVP. The team and I created personas for a small business owner, a cashier, a coffee shop owner and an online entrepreneur. The product manager decided that for MVP our target market is mainly small to medium businesses who currently use the Merchant App & payment device that Capitec offers.
The below persona does not contain any real personal details that we originally used due to confidentiality.
User Story Mapping Workshop
I prefer to run a user story mapping session with stakeholders and the team early on in the process. This helps to define different requirements in a user-centred way since we use the personas created as a starting point. Going through all the activities the user would need to complete and listing all of the requirements we can think of.
Then the product manager along with the team will prioritise these requirements and choose an MVP.
The below is a screenshot of the workshop, certain detail is hidden since it was not part of the initial MVP.
Brainstorming & Ideation
User flows
The user flows were brainstormed and iterated on a few times, even after I started designing wireframes I ended up changing the flows. Some of the flows were to complex once they were out into wireframes and it needed to be stripped back a lot.
Information Architecture
The information architecture needed to be extremely flat and allow users to switch between the different activities within a few clicks.
The below is a screenshot of the IA, certain detail is hidden since it was not part of the initial MVP.
Design & Prototyping
This was the longest phase of the project and we kept going back and worth between design and ideation.
Low (ish) Fidelity Wireframing
The low fidelity wireframing started with using components from the Capitec Banking App since this would cut development time. After a few iterations it was clear that we were going to need a few new components to allow for simple journeys.
High Fidelity Wireframes and Prototyping
The last phase was spent cleaning up the UI and finalising the look and feel. Once development started we realised the POS devices had a tendency to "screen burn" and decided to go for a darker UI on the pages that would be on for long periods of times.
Key Learnings & Rolling off
Sadly, my time at Capitec came to an end and I had to roll off the project just as the MVP went live with the pilot merchants. This is one of my proudest projects to date and I value the experience I had with the team. The team have been improving and updating the app and it has seen over 13 000 new merchants being onboarded a month.
Key learnings:
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The value of interacting with your users
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The power of ideation and brainstorming with a cross-functional team
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The way users interact with a POS is much different to a mobile device
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Create happy moments in journeys even if it's not needed
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UX is also about how much user's enjoy using your product not just the efficiency, add that extra click here and there.