Justin Scherer

Tl;dr

Stax is a trans-institutional, multinational, internet optional financial super app in sub-Saharan Africa. I led and executed the design of the app from end to end. Since it came out of beta in March 2021, Stax has expanded to support basic banking and mobile money transactions for dozens of financial institutions in 10 countries across sub-Saharan Africa. In its first 7 months, over 50,000 users downloaded Stax to use all their accounts in one place without needing internet data or a high-end smartphone.

The Challenge

Millions of people (most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia) use an outdated, difficult to use protocol from the 90s called "unstructured supplementary service data" (USSD) to access their money on a daily basis. The core technology behind Stax allows the app to perform USSD actions on a user’s behalf in the background of a typical Android application. Hover released this core tech as an Android SDK so that developers could build inclusive financial tools for their own communities. Although thousands of developers used the Hover SDK to build apps, they often failed to get traction with users. In response, we pivoted to build the app that we'd always hoped would exist and made it open source so that we could lay a foundation and have different communities remix the app for their own needs. Our vision for Stax became a human centred, trans-institutional, multinational financial "super app" for the Global South, starting with sub-Saharan Africa. Our initial value propositions let people access their money offline and have all their accounts in one place. We did all this in an app that takes up less than 10MB on their phones.

As the Head of Design for Stax, I lead our design from concept to execution, I creative directed the visual identity, I did the information architecture, interaction design, UI, and brand. I designed Stax from end to end. I also guided and fed back into our research efforts.

Approach

No neocolonial vibes

Stax is the latest in a series of products and services I've built over the last five years or so that are used primarily in less affluent countries than mine. Structurally and situationally there was a risk of creating what I usually describe as a "neo-colonial vibe" between myself and most of the people who use the things I make. I have always worked hard against those structures, otherwise it would have been impossible for me to do my job ethically. One of the strategies I employed to understand the contexts of use for Stax was travel. From 2017-19 I was on the road for field research, team retreats and conferences for roughly 30-40% of the year. When we pivoted to Stax at the end of 2019, we had no idea that the state of the world would take the turn that it has, and we assumed that we would remain close to the people Stax serves through regular travel, in-depth research, and sharing working environments with colleagues who already live in other parts of the world. Obviously things didn't work out that way.

Insight-led design

My design practice has always been research and insight driven. I'm much less comfortable with "big design up front," big reveals, and the designer as "auteur." I much prefer a role that approaches design like a facilitator who gathers insights and translates them into the nitty gritty design decisions that make up a user experience and brand. As a researcher, I have been heavily influenced by the "pop-up studio" field study approach used by Jan Chipchase and Studio D Radiodurans. In the two years before we built Stax, I led three multi-week, multi-national field studies in sub-Saharan Africa. This previous work gave me the frameworks I needed to begin with Stax. I recognized that there would be an inevitable gap between my experience and that of most of our users, so I advocated early on to add a full-time design researcher to the design team. As it became clear that regular, convenient travel would no longer be a feasible strategy, I leaned on insights gathered during remote qualitative and quantitative research and guided our research practice so that we would remain relevant to the lived contexts of the people we served.

I also believe that "everyone does UX" on a digital product team, that insights can come from anywhere and everyone, and that my job is first-and-foremost to listen. This approach let me take insights from diverse sources and integrate them into a cohesive user experience that we released incrementally with a small, cross-functional team of high-performing developers and product folks.

Keep ‘em separated

Although one of the primary value propositions of Stax is to be able to use all of your accounts from one app, we were very careful to make the accounts within Stax feel separate. People curate their financial products in a very specific way, and we wanted the design to reflect that reality. We did this by using tweaked versions of a service's brand colours on it's own individual card in the interface. We were also very careful about language and found that describing our onboarding as "linking" an account performed better than "adding" accounts, which suggested that we would add everything indiscriminately to one big pot.

The places where people use Stax are often called "low-trust environments." As far as technology is concerned, there are many scammy, spammy apps and schemes created by bad actors. Generally speaking, people in those environments have responded by becoming more sophisticated tech users. We assumed that, by obfuscating as much of the painful USSD mechanisms behind Stax, that people would rejoice at a more accessible, usable financial experience. Instead, early Stax users reacted to an automagical app moving money without internet with skepticism instead of excitement. In research we noticed that people had "lightbulb moments" when they actually understand what Stax did in the background. In response to this insight, we showed transaction details as a kind of receipt for each transaction because they include a record of the actual USSD session that took place in the background of the app. This functioned both as transaction feedback and a teaching tool to show how Stax works.

Compensated crowdsourcing as the key to scale

In order to complete transactions for our customers we needed to build a map of the chaotic USSD menus that Stax would automate. We created a model for compensated crowdsourcing, where we release bounties for services we need to extend our coverage, and if a user has a particular combination of accounts they could securely and confidentially map them to extend Stax's coverage and be compensated in return. This feature became wildly popular, so much so that we had to decrease the number of bounties we offered. This solved one of the "wicked problems" facing Stax: how to map out the bewildering forest of USSD root menus without access to accounts and SIM cards in every country we sought to support.

Stax came out of beta in March 2021, and in its first seven months over 50K people downloaded the app. Stax serves dozens of financial services in ~10 countries, and it keeps growing faster every day.