Meet the Nigerian Product Designer Behind This Fund Management Company

Developers, the backbone of the world’s growing technology-driven economy, are building products that enhance life’s experience. Products that are pushing society forward. This process, not done in isolation, is collaborative. Inclusive of people from various disciplines. One that has grown in significance over the years is product designers. 

In a recent study, Onward Search ranked Product Designer’s number one on its list of Most In-Demand Digital Creative Talent for 2019. Outranking Front-end and Full-stack Developers, which came in at ten and twelve. 

As the mobile computing era reaches maturity, no longer is merely a functioning application enough, end-users now expect digital product’s to have a seamless, frictionless experience. In the financial services industry where stringent regulations require companies to understand whom they’re doing business with. Securing KYC “know your client” information/ documentation has become critical. Ultimately challenging companies to create a user experience that captures the required information while simultaneously preventing customer frustration.

Launching its digital platform in 2018, Kudy Financials Limited is a Nigerian fund management company. Kudy provides foreign-currency-denominated investment opportunities to African millennials with the hope of helping them reach their personal finance goals, and ultimately financial freedom.

I spoke with Ugo Ifezue, a Product Designer at Toptal, about designing the kudy.io digital product for Kudy Financials, the challenges of creating a frictionless UX/UI, and Tech in Africa.

What was your design process for building the Kudy Financial site? 

First, I discussed the existing business model with the client to discover their process. They walked me through everything from beginning to end while also sharing the challenges that they recognized, especially in terms of scaling up — sharing that they wanted to do more with little time and less human interaction.

Then I asked for all the artifacts, the documents that provided a trail of the process. I used that to create a user flow. Also, identifying the pain points and all the design solutions that I could address at each point. From there, I developed a new user flow for the system and presented it to the client — sharing the new process for getting users into the system and how to engage them. 

Finally, we got to branding the product. After learning the client’s taste, I created a rough draft of the branding, and once I got approval, I started designing the product in Sketch. 

How important is empathy in the UX/ UI Design process as it relates to the end-user?  

Design is having empathy. It’s what drives me to have a conversation with a business in the first place. I really want to understand their business. If you look at a company’s business model, it’s driven-by revenue or profits. They want their customers to help them make more money. So in return, as a company, the least you can do is be empathetic enough around how you provide services. 

You accomplish this by understanding your business process and then refining it in a way that serves the users best. Empathy is putting users first and eliminating any sort of pain points that would cause them to leave the product or not enjoy their experience. It’s pretty much the main ingredient in design. 

How does your development background help you as a designer?  

I was working at an e-commerce company as a developer when I transitioned to a product designer. We kept paying research firms to help us understand our low conversion rates, and I wondered, “why can’t we do this in-house?” And it occurred to me that we were developing our site based on features that we wanted users to use, and we didn’t look at how people were using the site. I took a step back from development and became the guy that did all the research, sketching, and wireframing.

As a designer and someone who has software development experience and the skillset, I’m very empathetic and functional. I know what designs are feasible and implementable from a developer’s point. I had all those constraints already going into design. When building a product, I try my best to be as creative as possible while at the same time appreciating the constraints of development. I also occasionally convert my designs into code. Developers usually don’t like implementing hard designs. I have an advantage because I’m able to both design and implement.

What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during the design/ development process? 

The biggest challenge was that the developers were not brought on as early as possible. When you’re building products from scratch, ideally, you want all the stakeholders involved in that product available early. The client wanted to add a crypto fund to their list of funds. So I designed something based on my own understanding, the client’s idea of how the fund would operate, and a crypto expert. But when the developers came on board, they pointed out some very critical missing pieces that we needed to consider. Details I, the client, and the crypto expert would have never known. The crypto expert had never developed an application, so he knew crypto from a particular angle, and the developers knew it from another angle. When they came on board, we had to do some design revisions. Now going forward on any project, I plan to have all the relevant stakeholders around during the design discussions.