Increasing employee Happiness through easy to access pay advances.
Zafe had a big dream, creating an easy way for employers to set up pay advance options for their employees. Many small businesses needed help managing a pay advance option as their accounting and hr teams were usually small or dependent on the CEO/Founder.
Employers considered this process time-consuming, and although it has potential benefits for their employees, they needed more human resources to drive the pay advance program.
Through our research, we determined that while some banks gave these offers, their interest rates/payback methods were challenging for the employees. We also learnt that employees with easier access to money or at least knew of somewhere to get money in desperate times felt more confident at work and in their daily lives.
My role in the project
This project was broken into two phases:
Phase 1
During phase one (1), I was the sole product designer in a team of two (2) engineers and a project owner. Throughout this phase, we focused on concept validation and designing/ implementing the first iteration of the mobile app.
My job was to assist with validating a use case for the product and designing the MVP, explicitly focusing on figuring out the users and the minimum needed features.
Phase 2
During phase two (2), I led a team of three (3) designers and collaborated with seven (7) engineers, a product owner and a marketer. Our focus throughout this phase was the implementation of an admin dashboard and employer dashboard, as well as allowing employees to take advances over a longer period.
We each had specific responsibilities; my job upfront was to organize the design team, structuring the project so that we could each focus on different sections of the project but keep a similar design language. I also focused directly on the employer dashboard, building taxonomy and prototyping.
Phase 1: the directive - implement a working MVP within two months
Being a startup, the Zafe team had a small budget and limited time to build on their proof of concept and implement the product in various small businesses. This directive gave the team 2 months to fully implement a working MVP which could then be used to sell the idea to investors.
This timeline meant the team and I had to be creative, quick and relatively correct about the solution used to implement employee advances. Due to the nature of the project, we narrowed the design phase to two weeks to allow development to start quickly.
Week 1
With such a short timeframe, I had to be creative in researching the product both in concept validation and product fit for employees. To make the best use of this time, I focused on interacting with potential users through various social media groups, gathering as many details as possible on the pay advance experience.
I also focused on the information architecture and wireframing with sprint meetings daily (sometimes two times a day) to confirm any questions I had about the feasibility of implementation.
Week 2
After getting a sign-off from the project manager, it was time to focus on the visual style of Zafe’s mobile app. The solution we implemented would allow users to apply for advances once their identity is verified using Zafe’s sister company, Orba One’s verification product.
This method allowed for Zafe to limit the amount of work it had to do on the verification side and focus directly on advances.
Phase 2: The Directive - Reduce the time taken for Employers to send Payments
After creating an MVP, that executive leadership could pitch to investors and testing with one company in the alpha stage, the project owner felt pressure to complete the first version of the Zafe application.
Having provided the mobile app, some aspects of the advance disbursement process were still manual. Our tasks through this phase reduce/remove all the manual elements of the pay advance process.
Initially, I organized the design team and created a project framework that maintained a consistent design style while allowing us to work on different areas. I also worked on developing the employer dashboard by creating prototypes and constructing its information architecture.
Organizing the new team structure
As with the nature of any startup, time is always of the essence. I quickly prioritized building synergy between myself, my team and the Zafe team. Our first few sprints were focused on scoping the project as a team. After this, I spent time ensuring that our new designers knew what the goal of Zafe was and what the system they were building was trying to achieve.
After this, I was able to split the project into its three new components, “Term Advances”, “Employer Dashboard”, and “Admin Dashboard”. After evaluating the components, I decided it was best we tackled it by:
- Having the new designers focus on the admin dashboard since they would be able to get quick feedback from users of the admin system (Zafe’s team)
- Assigning myself the Employer dashboard since I have the most experience working on the project and fully understand the organizational goals.
- Coming together to work on the term loan functionality as the concept (although mentioned from the start) was new to the overall project.
Phase summary
Without going into too many details on the similar strategy, I took to phase one (1); I created user flows, an information architecture, and high-fidelity mockups that were later set up as a prototype for testing.
Overall, this phase was much less stressful than the first one; with more time to focus on the project and a larger team, we produced some great work. This allowed Zafe to enter its beta stage with eight (8) companies. Which was four (4) more than the team thought they would have been able to convince to run the pilot program.
