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Vodacom: How might a telco empower its workforce?
category: product design | AGENCY: AIMGROUp | country: mozambique | year: 2018
Vodacom Mozambique is a subsidiary of Vodacom Group Pty, and employs nearly 500 staff that are spread across 10 provinces and 129 districts. These workforce serves about 6 million customers with; voice, messaging, data, mobile money amongst other services. A key challenge for corperations this large is the lack of visibility on staff especially those out on the field, and their myriad of activities.

The Brief
Our task was to design a solution that would help the client monitor, support and manage activities of field staff, and in particular, sales and marketing agents that operate out of office.

The key requirement was that the platform would aid agents in capturing merchandising and market data; managing inventory; selling products; and interacting with customers using a mobile application. The application would be managed through a reporting dashboard.

The following is a brief outlook of the process leading to the prototype.

Our Approach
As the design lead and HCD (Human Centered Design) evangelist/facilitator, my starting point is always user research, and in the first 12 weeks I led my team of designers, researchers, developers and product managers through a series of workshops as we sought out to understand and define the problem and users.
user analysis
The user list was drawn from both the mobile app and the reporting dashboard and fell under the following categories;
- Marketing Team
- Sales & Distribution Team
- Retail Team
- Teritory Supervisors
- Systems Administrators
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field research
Armed with a basic outline of the product, a team from R&D was sent out to Mozambique with to gather insights on the ground. This included interviews, observation and sometimes shadowing certain users as they went on their day so as to gain deeper understanding of their tasks and pain points. This new empirical data helped us validate earlier assumptions and shed more light on the direction of the project. We now had enough to create the first set of low fidelity wireframes that would constitute an MVP.
wireframes
Consequently as we gathered more insights I moved on to high fidelity wireframes and user flows that we could now use to do our first tests with the R&D team.
design and prototyping
At this stage we were now ready to commit to design of a working prototype so as to do more realistic tests. The image below shows a simpler version of the prototype with just a few screens. It is in this environment that I am able to see a clear user flow and interactions.
Live prototype
Lastly, I moved to the prototyping environment (Invision) and created a near final version of the product with interactions. This immersive experience helped us do more realistic tests with users and learn before hand-over to the product dev team.

Below is a short video of the final prototype.
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