Background

Vodacom Mozambique is a subsidiary of Vodacom Group Pty, and employs nearly 500 staff that are spread across 10 provinces and 129 districts. These workforce serves about 6 million customers with; voice, messaging, data, mobile money and other services. 

However, a key challenge for corporations this size is the lack of visibility on their workforce, especially staff that operate out of office and their myriad of activities. 

The Brief

There was a need for a solution that would improve efficiency and productivity, and the key requirement was that the platform would aid agents in capturing merchandising and market data; managing inventory; selling products; and interacting with customers via a mobile application. This application would be managed through a reporting dashboard.

The following is a summary of the project. Due to the NDA I have omitted a lot of information that may be deemed proprietary or sensitive.

Agency Team

Research & Development - 4
Experience Design - 2
Engineering & Development - 3
Product Management - 2
Project Management (Agile) - 2

User Research

The user list was drawn from both the mobile app and the reporting dashboard and fell under the following categories;

- Marketing Team
- Sales & Distribution Team
- Retail Team
- Territory Supervisors
- Systems Administrators

In the first few weeks, we sought out to understand and define the problem, business objectives and fundamentally the users’ tasks and needs and pain points. A team from R&D was sent out to Mozambique to gather data on the ground.

We conducted interviews, surveys, and observed users’ daily workflows. We found that besides the usual busy nature of African towns and cities, this group of users had to navigate a series of roadblocks which were primarily systemic in nature. It was clear at this stage that a lot of these processes could be automated.

Next, we downloaded all the data from the field and prepared it for synthesis. We extracted insights for each of the users, and with help of the R&D team we created detailed process flows for each role. This acted as a guide for developing journey maps which would then inform the first sets of wireframes.

I often find that clients and even internal teams sometimes struggle to make the connection by looking at static wireframes, so instead I’ll often build a quick low-fi prototype with key frames. This also acts as first MVP and can be used to do preliminary tests with a small group.

After several reviews and numerous iterations, we were ready to commit to design.

Outcome

The end result was a product that is used to gather real time insights from the market including branding, distribution, sales and consumer perception.

The platform generates business intelligence, analytics, data visualisation and data interpretation that can be translated into real-time business decisions.

Project Images