IDEO.org partnered with Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) and a major telecommunications company to discover insights about low-income Ghanaian mobile money users. We then applied those findings to design a way for the company to improve its offerings and, ultimately, increase the volume of customers and transactions. By boosting customer activity and the adoption of mobile tools, low-income individuals are able to gain better access to formal money management opportunities and rural, typically unreachable, clients are more easily reached.
Opportunities for Design
This design process entailed two successive field visits – first, to better understand the design brief and dive into the needs of the community and second, to explore our design opportunities through a series of prototypes.
Our first field visit came to an important series of insights about the current usage and perception of mobile money in Ghana. Among many insights, we found that potential customers either don’t understand the benefits of switching from cash to mobile cash, or if they do, they run into other barriers such as difficult mobile platform navigability or poor customer service.
These insights guided our process of identifying three key design opportunities: providing continuous support to customers, expanding the potential of the product and demonstrating its value, and building a visible community.
What We Designed
During our second visit to the field, our IDEO.org team along with out client teams set out to test our assumptions through four prototypes. Each concept aimed to better address the needs of customers along the entire experience spectrum, creating a new customer journey. Furthermore, we took a different approach in providing support and demonstrating the benefits of mobile money usage.
As our Ghanaian telecommunications company is working in a competitive market, we are not yet able to fully share these built out concepts and solutions. We will be posting once the time is appropriate for our client, however, so check back in a few short months to see the full deliverable!
