The Context
In the last decades, our relationship with eating and shopping changed dramatically. According to a recent McKinsey report1, food delivery has become a global market worthmore than $150 billion, led by the most mature markets worldwide: Australia, Canada, the UK, and the United States.
However, the reality for many countries isn’t so favorable: problems like insufficient internet infrastructure, imprecise GPS positioning, weak mobile network signals,and outdated devices can kill good initiatives.These problems are very real for some African regions where good digital services seem like a distant dream.
This scenario is quickly changing with the evolution of startups. According to Google’s Developer Ecosystem Report2, African startups raised more than $4.3 billion in 2021 from local and international investors, two and a half times the year before. While the numbers show optimism, it’s vital to remember Africa is not a small or homogeneous piece of land. Each of its 54 nations has its own challenges in terms of technology, infrastructure and culture.
As mentioned in a D4D Hub article about digital transformation in Africa3: “While learning from other countries is certainly part of the solution, African countries need to consider their own realities and adapt.”
Our project takes place in this dynamic context, having Angola as a starting point.
1 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/ordering-in-the-rapid-evolution-of-food-delivery
2 Google and Accenture Africa Developer Ecosystem 2021: Creating opportunities and building for the future
3 https://d4dhub.eu/news/digital-services-in-africa
The Challenge
At the beginning of 2022, Mamboo, an Angolan startup, contacted our studio with a daring proposal: helping them scale its digital shopping and delivery services across the African continent.
Mamboo connects stores and buyers through a mobile app where people can buy food and many other products. The app also includes a digital wallet and a package delivery service. It is worth mentioning that the startup employs its own couriers to carry out deliveries.
Since its debut, the startup has kept operating in Angola’s capital Luanda using the same app version with just a few minor updates. The application was full of inconsistencies, flaws, and dead ends that drastically reduced conversions, frustrating customers and consequently harming Mamboo’s Brand: more than 86% of users couldn’t finish an order, and only 18% returned to buy again.
For this challenge, we decided to execute a complete Service Design project to discover what was happening. This approach gave us a broad perspective of what users needed and plenty of space to propose new functionalities, guidelines, and support materials for the company to scale successfully.
Mambo is a traditional slang in Angola, meaning “thing”. Our mission for the next twelve weeks couldn’t be more straight: help small businesses sell things and people get the things they want.
First steps: understanding and proposing
Immersion
- In-depth Interviews: 12 Clients/users + 5 Mamboo Stakeholders.
- Benchmarking + Desk Research: National and International platforms and services.
Analysis
- Journeys & Flows: Visual customized diagrams to understand pains and opportunities.
- Heuristic Analysis: Deep Evaluation of Mamboo’s App usability.
Ideation
- Workshops: Remote workshops to find new opportunities and generate ideas.
- Priorization: Value Engineering tools to prioritize initiatives.
Getting ready to materialize: linking pains. ideas and journeys
Connecting all the information gathered during a service design project is no easy task. After multiple rounds of analysis, we understood improvements belonged to two primary groups:
• Essential improvements: Straight solutions, directly related to pains mentioned by users during interviews.
• Propositive improvements: Solutions that surpassed users’ expectations, like new engaging or innovative functionalities.
To bind those dimensions together, several visual tools were created. Those diagrams made it possible to visualize multiple aspects of the project at once, logically organized by the critical steps in the customer journey.
Wireframing: drafting the structure
Wireframing is a crucial step to design digital products by testing and iterating solutions. During this process, our diagrams varied between different levels of abstraction: from strictly textual to fully visual, always trying to allocate the essential and propositive improvements in the journey.
Key insights: what were we dealing with
- Bugs and more bugs
A considerable amount of systemic problems prevented users from reaching their objectives in the app. - Organization helps
The lack of standardization of interface elements (like buttons) caused a lot of confusion among users. - Infrastructure and Tech
The infrastructure of Angola and other countries had a lot of impact on some crucial steps of the journey. - Convenience and Speed
Users considered these features as the most important ones for a delivery app. - Customization is king
Users expected to receive custom recommendations, like having easy shortcuts to their favorite restaurants. - Exploring new things
Users also wanted to explore new restaurants, products, and stores. Good surprises are always welcome. - Search won’t work
The search functionality was considered almost useless. Users had a lot of trouble trying to find the things they wanted. - Types of users
Users could be divided into two main categories: those who knew exactly what to order and those who didn’t. - Mamboo Pay and Mamboo Pack?
Users often ignored Mamboo Pay and Mamboo Pack by the lack of communication and clear benefits. - Losing appetite
The app’s pictures of products and stores were often bad, duplicated, missing, or even strange. - Where is my lunch?
A considerable number of users reported they simply couldn’t track deliveries. The tracking page existed, didn’t work. - Lack of support
Many users reported the absence of a good support service when searching for information or in case of errors. - Tips, please!
Many users reported the absence of a “tips feature” as a way to help efficient delivery workers. - Favorite restaurants
Even though the choosing factor of a meal was sometimes unclear. Most users had a favorite restaurant in the app. - Can I order something else?
Most users related Mamboo to food delivery. Some of them didn’t even know other products could be ordered. - Mamboo is still the best
Despite its many problems, Mamboo is seen as the best brand among the existing Angolan concurrents.
Materialization: building the new solution
With all the rich material generated in the Immersion, Analysis and Ideation steps, we started to build the new app. Its strategy is grounded in four guidelines created by us:
- Propagate and enhance the use of other Mamboo services without hurting food delivery (the most profitable service).
- Refine and organize the interface, making it scalable but still intuitive for the current users.
- Streamline the experience, attending to customers’ tastes and needs and considering the application’s value propositions.
- Reflect during the experience on a clear rationale for indexing collections and their interrelationships (products, meals, restaurants, stores, markets, services).
The new structure is divided into three main services connected by a bottom menu: the shopping environment, the digital wallet and the package delivery service.
MambooShop: the new main enviroment, divided into eight product segments: Restaurants, Supermarkets, Drugstore, Spirits, Pet Shops, Clothing, Home and Events. Here, users can navigate through a a series of different tags and filters to find the things they need or discover new ones: from a traditional african meal to tickets for an upcoming samba concert.
MambooPay: the digital wallet environment. Here, users can receive and transfer real money to other users, pay bills and recharge their account with credits. This service was fully redesigned to deliver a more functional experience, making transactions easier. Mamboo Pay is also present along the checkout experience as a functional and convenient paying method.
MambooPack: an entirely updated service. Now, users can send and track their parcels with more control and awareness. New exciting features were also included to make the service engaging: multi-step journeys (more than one delivery point), real-time tracking, and even direct communication (calls and text messaging) with couriers.
Materialization: some features and highlights
Address double-check: This was one of the most necessary features for Mamboo. The lack of good GPS infrastructure in Angola and other African countries causes (many!) localization issues. To solve this, we used a simple but effective hack: users are always requested to confirm their addresses manually before delivery starts.
Friends: “Friends” is an innovative and engaging functionality: by activating it, you can discover new restaurants loved by the people you connect with and even earn cashback by influencing their decisions. It also makes choosing the recipient of your MambooPay transfers a lot faster.
Splitten Bills: Chasing friends up after a party? Embarrassing, isn’t it? Simply choose this option as the payment method in the checkout and keep everybody’s finances healthy: everybody gets charged equally before the food even arrives.
Cyclical orders: Cyclical orders help you with those supermarket essentials everybody must frequently buy like coffee or toilet paper. At the supermarket checkout, simply select this option to keep receiving the same goods at a chosen rate: daily, weekly or monthly. Pause, continue or cancel whenever you need.
Order status: The Order Status Bar is a convenient new interface element to ensure awareness between the user and the courier. It behaves like an “always on” button at the bottom of the screen while the order is being delivered. It also displays a linear progress bar, message notifications and the remaining distance.
Surprise me: “Surprise me” is a new feature that helps when you’re hungry but unsure what to eat. Simply choose the option from the home banner and let Mamboo recommend something delicious based on your taste. Not interested? No problem, “roll the dice” again!
Materialization: Mamboo's Design System V1, a compass for the future
All designers will agree: one of the most important (and complex) tasks for companies is keeping design consistency over time. For this reason, a way to prepare Mamboo for its future deployments was indispensable.
Together with the app, a new Design System was also built. This material, made available in Figma (world-renowned software for UX Design), includes all the assets, guidelines, and allowed variations for typography, buttons, states, lists, controls, data inputs, icons, and more.
Mamboo’s Design System V.1 is ready to be consulted and consumed by designers and developers, empowering anyone in the team to evolve Mamboo’s interface while maintaining a coherent design language.
