I talked with the Social Income nonprofit team (shoutout to Sandino and Rene!), and quickly discovered a few difficulties within their current income distribution flow. Social Income currently handles all transactions and requests manually. This comes with a couple of big problems. 🤔

Empowers recipients by giving them the ability to store their income in a digital wallet before transferring to their phone.

Recipients get a full history of all their income transactions so they can feel like they have all the facts and easily confirm with the Social Income team that they received their income or let the team know something went wrong so it can be fixed ASAP.

The Social Income Team can streamline their requests by automatically being notified whenever a recipient transfers money from their wallet or contests a transaction.

Recipients can give recommendation codes to their friends, family, and community members to help them join the Social Income program. Recipients can see how far their recomendees are in the onboarding process and contact Social Income if there is an issue.

Recipients can also receive social credit with each regular income deposit which they can donate to local community betterment projects through the Social Income application.

A lot of people in Sierra Leone don't have email addresses. The Social Income application instead gives recipients a wide variety of email-less methods to register and recover their digital wallet including QR code scanning and One Time Password input.

Recipients can have 2 other recipients or a Social Income team member vouch for them.

Sierra Leone has a literacy rate around 50% (as of 2021). This means our application has to be easy to understand from context. In addition, the text used in application needs to be as simplified as possible.
In order to mindfully build this into the application, I did some preliminary research on Plain Language by reading through the Federal Plain Language Guidelines.

While these guidelines were established by the U.S. they did provide me with some valuable standard practices to follow in order to make the application more accessible to people with varying levels of reading comprehension:

Another thing I sought to understand prior to designing was what the phone market looked like in Sierra Leone. By understanding what mobile systems are popular, I could also get a sense for what phone interactions may be more familiar to recipients.

Of those with access to smartphones, a huge chunk of the market uses Android. Because Apple made up a considerable minority, we determined we should make both an Android and iOS compatible application, with a significant amount of importance placed on making the Android compatible version seamless and reliable.

Based on the fact that majority of the phone market is familiar with the Android interface, I chose to utilize Google's Material Design system for the application interface and interactions.

The Social Income team created some initial wireframes to demonstrate the vision they had for their application. This helped a lot because we could see what the key features were already.

I ran quick critique sessions where I reviewed the wireframes and also got feedback from a couple peers, the Social Income team, and my Develop for Good team in order to assess what was working well with the client wireframes and what we could improve.

Upon talking to the Social Income team and reviewing their preliminary wireframes for their income management process, I realized that there was a huge chunk of income management capabilities that were not yet represented through the preliminary wireframes. In order to build understanding and alignment within the team, I constructed a user flow which I reviewed with the rest of my product team as well as the Social Income team before moving forward with the next iteration of wireframes.