Helping retailers sell, manage, and grow

Kwiksell · 2021

Role: Design, research & strategy
Team: Product designer, PM, engineers
Timeline: 6 months

Context

Kwiksell, formerly Eyowo Retail, was built for small retailers. Its sales and management features attracted a wider audience, including supermarkets and restaurants. By 2021, those new use cases exposed the product's limits, and feature requests and complaints piled up. We redesigned it to serve the businesses it had grown into.

The Eyowo Retail merchant dashboard before the redesign

The problem

Selling and collecting payments was cumbersome, so orders were slow to fulfil and customers didn't return. Inventory data and reporting were unreliable. And one product flow served every business the same way, whether it was a market stall or a restaurant kitchen.

Impact

+40%Acquisition
+85%Engagement
+100%Transactions

What I did

Understanding how different merchants ran their businesses

We researched with 18 merchants across 8 industries, in interviews and field studies of their shops. Their needs came down to five things: accountability, convenience, efficiency, accuracy, and personalisation. Every merchant needed to sell and account for it without friction, but what that looked like differed by business.

The research plan for Eyowo Retail, covering background, aim and goal, methodology, activities, and the question and task script — Research plan.

Merchant persona: an entrepreneur whose pain points are manual inventory tracking, expensive software and limited payment methods, needing one intuitive system to track stock and sales — Merchant persona.

Sales representative persona: pain points are unreliable POS terminals and manually confirming bank transfers, needing a seamless way to collect payment — Sales representative persona.

Deciding what should stay consistent

I kept selling universal and shaped everything else to the business. Every merchant got the same fast way to sell and get paid, and features like the kitchen display system existed only for the businesses that needed them.

Kwiksell sell screen: item list, cart, and USSD/QR payment — **Sell.** The home screen. Search items, add to cart, charge, and take payment the way the customer prefers.

Kwiksell orders, customer list, and customer details screens — **Orders and customers.** Pending orders and daily sales in one view, with customer behaviour tracking and grouped SMS marketing.

Kwiksell desktop inventory: item library with stock, price, and variants — **Inventory.** Categories, discounts, tax, stock histories, variants and multi-location management, on desktop where that work happens.

Kwiksell kitchen display system: opened and completed order tickets — **Kitchen display.** Restaurant orders go straight from waitstaff to the kitchen, cutting order mix-ups.

Learning

Personalising a product starts with deciding what should stay the same for everyone.