Developing a Term of Payment (TOP) Feature For Mom-and-Pop Shop

Bon Pintar is a financing feature in Warung Pintar Application (AWP) developed to help users increase their capital to fulfill their warung's needs. As part of the product discovery project in Q1 2021, this research aimed to improve value proposition and its services.

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New feature new struggle

When the times were facilitated by technology and all necessities could be accessed through the application, Mom-and-pop shop (warung) still fulfilled their trading needs through wholesalers. However, many tech companies made breakthroughs to accommodate warungs to meet their needs; one is Warung Pintar with the Warung Pintar Application.

Of the many types of warung that exist, they have a different daily turnover that affects their purchasing power using the application. Warung Pintar then developed a financing feature (Bon Pintar) to increase the capital for traders to buy goods. Unfortunately, when this feature was released, several obstacles made the attraction seem small to be comparable to the usage rate.

By using observational research and phone interview methodologies, we want to understand and learn the habits of the merchant as users, especially in their financial cycle, as well as their sentiments on financing features.

How does user manage their cash flow?

What is the user's sentiment on TOP feature?

How might we increase Bon Pintar traction and usage?

We expected the results of observations and interview answers to help the product team develop this feature to increase Bon Pintar's traction.

The research phase

In phase one, we would like to understand the user's financial cycle and habits in managing money. In total ten days, we took two days to prepare and finalize observation and question lists, five days for fieldwork, and three days to synthesize and develop recommendations.

With a reasonably short time in this first phase, its implementation has several constraints: the COVID situation and the relatively small number of team members. Naturally, it creates limitations in its implementation. Moreover, financial topics for users are pretty sensitive and confidential to share. We then chose users with a relatively high level of cooperation which can indicate from their track record in surveys and research participation conducted several months prior. Fortunately, we managed to shadow three users located in Bandung, Depok, and Jakarta.

These three users have different backgrounds and experiences operating warung, so they manage money differently. Among the three, Warung Dicky and Toko Asnet have been in the shop for almost ten years, while Toko Andi is less than a year old. While Toko Asnet is quite difficult to survive during a pandemic, the financial cycle at Warung Dicky is not much different before the pandemic started. With their struggles, they have a polarity in their daily life at the warung and handling cash flow. However, they share the same view on the use of TOP features, payment methods for settlement, and items with fast turnover in their warung.

Once the observational research is finished, we want to determine how users respond to the TOP feature with users exposed to the Bon Pintar feature in the second phase. Of the ten target participants, we managed to conduct phone interviews with eight users. Their sentiments are almost similar during observational research. They tend to have positive sentiments towards the TOP feature. However, we also note some objections and input related to their principles and technical matters so that this feature can attract more people. Capturing their aspirations, we then mapped them into an empathy map that divides them into users with positive and opposite sentiments.

In the third phase, which falls in March 2021, I facilitated six Bon Pintar Product Teams conducting an online workshop. Aimed to improve Bon Pintar traction, this workshop is divided into four sessions: immersion session, empathize session, Ideation session, and storyboarding.

To share context, in the immersion session, the Product Manager told us its struggle, flow, and the current state of Bon Pintar while the UXR team given all the user insights from recent research. After the product team shared the context, in the empathize session, all the participants must put the existing and their user insights on the empathy map to understand our users better. Their gain and pain points are then mapped on the existing user journey, divided into several stages. Later we found the user pain points were accumulated in a particular stage of the user journey.

Continue to Ideation Session; we used the "How Might We" method to solve the problem by creating design opportunities. We managed to categorize seven issues in this stage and voted to decide which was the most urgent matter to solve.

Hereupon, we divided the participants into a group consist of two people for the Storyboarding session. Each group needed to develop ideas to solve the urgent issue. It took about 15 minutes to make the storyboard; they managed to create exciting ideas that they managed to consider for further development.

All and all

A product discovery project is a long process. Even within three months, I believe there is more to be done and delivered. Not to mention the pandemic conditions and the small number of teams which have limitations in implementation. This research phase is still one of many related research projects to develop Bon Pintar products.