Design Challenge Solution — Simple Case Study

Overview

Simple is a fintech startup, democratizing the way businesses receive and make payments in sub-Saharan Africa. Simple currently runs in 10 African countries, servicing over 10 million customers, and 1 million merchants daily.

Task

1. Design/propose an end-to-end MFA (Multi-Factor Authenticator) feature solution (show how you would approach this task).
2. Design an elevator Design System for Simple (we would need to inspect your design file).
3. Share a workable prototype.

To tackle this, I have drafted six steps to achieve this.

Step 1: Understand the goal of the project

To tackle this design challenge, I answered six questions — “Five W’s and How” (5W, 1H):

1. Why am I building this?
2. Who am I building it for?
3. When and where will it be used?
4. What am I building?
5. How could I measure it?

Here, the goal of the product is to increase Simple’s credibility, improve retention, and increase brand value to its customers. This serves as an opportunity for Simple to add an extra layer of security to its product, help
reduce the risk of a security breach drastically, and ensure sensitive data of its users and customers stays protected.

Step 2: Step 2: Define the Audience (Who)

For this product, we need to understand the people we’re building for. These I did by taking a wide guess from the brief that was shared. It was said that Simple runs in 10 African countries and serves over 10 million
customers, and 1 million merchants daily. Then I classified it into:

1. Age: 18 years to 70 years
2. Location: Urban and Rural Cities

Step 3: Understanding the Customer’s Context and Needs (When and Where)

The goal here is to understand when and where Simple’s customers might experience this problem and how we can solve it. This information will help us know how we would design and build the product.

For this step, I’ll make use of the User Story Technique.

“As an entrepreneur/graduate/executive/employee who owns a business, I want to be able to have a conviction and assurance that my business is secured against breach, hack, and fraud attempts, so my transactions with my customers can always go on seamlessly and with ease of use for my customers”

Step 4: List Ideas (What)

Now is the time to explain what Simple can build to fulfill the customer’s needs

1. Type of Product: Digital
2. Platform: Mobile Smartphone
3. Type of Interface: Graphic

Possible Solutions

To come up with the solution, I used this framework Build X for <Who / Step 2>, that <When and Where / Step 3> to <Why /Step 1>.

Build a feature on their mobile app that alerts the customers on logging in to activate a multifactor authentication method for signing in and also making transactions on the mobile app.

To activate this feature on their mobile apps, the customer must either have something specific in their possession to log in, such as a badge, token, key fob, or phone subscriber identity module (SIM) card that integrates with an OTP app or Google Authenticator or they can make use of biological
traits or inherence technologies like facial recognition, fingerprint scan, and retina or iris scan.

Step 5: Solve

The deliverables for the product are:

1. Hi-Fidelity Wireframe
2. User Flow
3. Sketches
4. User Personas
5. Design Prototype

List of tasks the customers need to be able to complete to use the product successfully

1. Sign Up/Create an Account.
2. Choose the preferred MFA method (2FA or 3FA).
3. For 2-factor authentication, select between Phone Number/Email Address and Google Authenticator.
4. For 3-factor authentication, select between Face ID & Finger Print to authenticate.

Paper Sketch

In this technique, I mapped out the customer’s journey to see what interactions the new feature needs to support them. Exploring these interactions gave me some ideas for the interface.

Smile Paper Sketch

Task flow

Hi-Fidelity Designs

You can take a look at the prototype HERE

Step 6: Measuring Success

The final thing I would do before the launch is to make sure we define KPIs that will indicate the success of this solution and the numbers which would be considered a success. I’d work with the product manager to understand what KPIs we should measure and what would be considered a success.

Some example metrics we could use to measure the success of the feature:

1. Task success rate — the percentage of correctly completed tasks by users.
2. Task completion time — the time it takes for the user to complete the task.
3. Engagement — how often users interact with the feature desirably.
4. Retention — how often a desirable action is taken by users.
5. Revenue — in what way does the product make money and how much does it make?
6. Conversion — the percentage of users who take the desired action.
7. User acquisition — persuading the customer to purchase a company’s goods or services.
8. Net promoter score (NPS) — customer satisfaction measured through their willingness to recommend the company’s products to others.

Validating Solution & Future Ideas

To validate this solution that I have come up with, also to make sure Simple doesn’t invest several months into development before validating that this has good potential, I’ll propose we conduct a usability study with Simple’s alpha testers to get feedback and to ensure the plan for a product’s functions, features, and overall purpose are in line with what users want by observing
how Simple’s users use the feature.

To further ensure a strict authentication method, a fourth-factor level authentication can be introduced later on in the future. Since the majority of the users typically carry their phones, and all basic smartphones have Global
Positioning System tracking, this can provide credible confirmation of the login location.

Also, time-based authentication can be used to prove a user’s identity by detecting presence at a specific time of day and granting access to a certain system or location.

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