Company: Lynk, 4.6 star rating (10.1K reviews), 100K+ Downloads (06.10.2023)
Role: EXTERNAL User Research Lead and Design Lead mentor
Dates: November 2020 - October 2023
Making Jamaican consumers happier by providing them with a save payment method.
Situation
Jamaica is a cash-oriented country when it comes to people paying for products and services. Paying and receiving cash can create safety issues for consumers as for merchants on the one hand, on the other hand a lot of Jamaicans are unbanked or underbanked which results them not having access to a debit- or credit card.
A big international consulting company offered to NCB bank-Jamaica’s biggest national bank- the build of a spinoff fintech start up dedicated to transform Jamaica from a cash-payment-oriented population to a digital-payment-oriented society. All during the pandemic in which the whole process was supposed to happen remotely.
Task
We had to research the digital readiness and to investigate the consumers’ mental model around payments in general.
Same time the recently born start up needed a design process and org and culture. Same time in which tech and product teams were building their own processes and organisations we needed to define proactively integrated work process based on agile sprints.
Additional I found myself in a position as the most senior designer to accompany the design director from the consulting company to find and choose local product designers.
Actions
Research: Preparing teams for qualitative and quantitative research by mentoring with hands on research methods. Once the team started and felt comfortable applying the learned we established research processes, it communications and documentation to make sure that insights were shared with everyone at the company and the work was not lost in the “research nirvana”.
Design: I was reviewing regularly design proposals and gave feedback based on experience, heuristic viewpoints and best practices.
Mentorship: Based on my experience as a design and user research lead I mentored as a contractor not only the junior product designers but also the employed design lead.
Processes: We created internal design processes which then were synced with tech and product teams. Most important we established a design QA processes to make sure that designs were 100 % reflected in production.
Organization: Last but not least I created design role descriptions and career paths since product design and user research is still at an early stage in Jamaica.
Key take aways
The cultural aspect is key when it comes to establish a team from 0. You can not follow a “general” formula but being very careful and respectful when building a team. Although the designs of some products/ services are well known all over the world (e.g. apple, google, Meta etc.) peoples’ perspective on these products and corresponding designs oftentimes vary based on their cultures and environments.