Creating the UK African Vendor Finder MVP

Bringing Visibility to African Vendors in the UK: Designing the UK African Vendor Finder Website

Despite the availability of various online platforms, African vendors in the UK struggled with visibility, onboarding complexities, and trust issues. The UK African Vendor Finder project sought to solve these challenges by creating a user-friendly, culturally resonant platform tailored to their unique needs.

The Client

Sinot Tech Solutions specializes in building technology solutions for underserved markets. The UK African Vendor Finder platform was designed to aggregate African entrepreneurs and service providers, fostering visibility, trust, and community engagement.
The platform serves as a bridge for vendors and customers, providing a centralized location for discovering authentic African services while empowering vendors to grow their businesses.

My role

As a UX Designer and Product Manager, my responsibilities included:

To collaborate in launching the MVP of the UK Vendor Finder website, working closely with developers and other stakeholders.
To play an active role in the scrum team, ensuring the website’s development aligns with user needs and business goals.
To lead the design process, creating high-fidelity designs and providing design direction.
To contribute to building the website by developing user-centered features and refining the overall user experience.
Coordinate with developers and other team members to ensure the timely delivery of high-quality product features.

Tools

Figma
Illustrator
Google Workspace

Problem Statement

The African Vendor Finder U.K. recognizes the immense potential and value that migrant entrepreneurs bring to the economy. Despite their skills and services, these entrepreneurs often face significant challenges in gaining visibility and accessing market opportunities. Currently, no centralized platform allows talented African individuals, entrepreneurs, and vendors to showcase their offerings across various sectors, such as catering, hospitality, tech, education, and more. Without such a platform, these entrepreneurs struggle to connect with their target audience, resulting in missed business opportunities and hindering the growth of the entrepreneurs and the wider community.

Proposed Solution

To tackle the visibility and market access challenges African entrepreneurs face in the U.K., the African Vendor Finder U.K. platform will provide a centralized digital space to showcase their diverse services. This platform will:

Feature detailed vendor profiles with service descriptions, images, and customer reviews, allowing vendors to effectively highlight their unique offerings and build trust with potential clients.
Offer advanced search and filtering options, enabling users to effortlessly find vendors by category, location, price range, ratings, and operating hours.

User research stage

To ensure the success of the UK Vendor Finder website, comprehensive user research was conducted to deeply understand the needs, challenges, and behaviors of local vendors and users seeking their services. The research methods employed included:

Methods Used

User Interviews:
- I interviewed 8 vendors and customers to uncover their needs, pain points, and expectations. check the recorded interviews here for further insights.
Empathy Mapping:
- Mapped user frustrations and goals, identifying key areas for improvement like navigation and communication.
Competitor Analysis:
- Analyzed competitors to find market gaps, such as a lack of tailored services and insufficient vendor profiles.

User Research Insights

Following in-depth interviews with eight vendors and customers, I gathered key insights into their needs, pain points, and expectations. This research laid the foundation for understanding the challenges faced by African entrepreneurs in the U.K. and helped inform the design process.
Click below to read the full interview questions and insights gathered during the research phase:
View Interview Questions & Insights

Competitive Analysis

My team and I conducted a competitive audit to understand the market and existing solutions better. This involved analyzing similar platforms to identify their strengths, weaknesses, and gaps. The findings from the competitive study helped highlight opportunities for differentiation and improvements in our design.

Explore the full audit and analysis here:
View Full Competitive Audit

Empathy Map

I created an empathy map to synthesize the insights from the user research. This tool helped me visualize our target users’ feelings, thoughts, needs, and pain points. By putting myself in the users’ shoes, I better understood their frustrations and motivations, guiding the design to address their needs.

Persona

Based on the research data, I developed personas to represent key user segments. These personas helped humanize the data, offering a clear view of who the users are, what they care about, and how they interact with similar platforms. The personas acted as a constant reminder of the users’ goals throughout the design process.

User Journey Map

As a team, we mapped out the user journey to visualize the steps users take when interacting with a platform like ours. This collaborative effort highlighted key touchpoints and potential areas of friction, enabling us to focus on improving the overall user experience by designing more intuitive and efficient pathways.

Low-Fidelity Designs

Using the user journey map insights, ideas were translated into low-fidelity wireframes. These initial sketches focused on layout, functionality, and user flow, allowing us to quickly iterate and validate our concepts before moving on to more polished designs.

Feedback from Usability testing

We conducted usability testing using the low-fidelity prototypes to ensure that the designs met user needs and expectations. The goal was to validate the user flow, identify pain points, and gather feedback on the overall functionality.
During the testing process:
Participants were asked to complete key tasks, such as searching for a vendor or navigating the platform, to simulate real-world scenarios.
Observations and feedback were recorded to identify areas of confusion or friction in the design.

Based on the insights, we iteratively refined the lo-fi prototypes to improve usability and align the designs with user expectations.

Transition to High-Fidelity Designs

Based on the feedback gathered, high-fidelity (hi-fi) designs were created to incorporate these improvements. High-fidelity designs allow focus on the finer details—such as color schemes, typography, and imagery—while ensuring a seamless and engaging user experience.