Apr → Jul 2017
B2C Fintech
UX & UI
Helping informal entrepreneurs manage their finances
Context
Crossing continents
During my time at IDEO San Francisco, I joined La Victoria Lab in Lima, Peru, for a four-month project with Interbank. As part of their digital transformation strategy, we set out to design a service that would help small entrepreneurs better manage their finances and improve the long-term sustainability of their businesses.
Approach
Effortless interactions
For small, often informal entrepreneurs in Peru, running a business means juggling orders, payments, and records across notebooks, text messages, and memory. The value proposition of Nando was simple: provide clarity and peace of mind by putting financial management, order tracking, and insights into one mobile app.
To make the experience usable in busy, on-the-go environments, we developed the design principle 'Effortless Interactions':
Interfaces optimized for one-handed use.
Minimal mandatory fields to reduce friction.
Simple, intuitive copy phrased as questions instead of technical terms.
A restrained, consistent color palette to guide attention.
Prototyping the problem
The project began with uncertainty: even the problem space wasn’t clear. We first decided to focus on small, informal entrepreneurs and then used prototypes to explore which challenges mattered most.
To test different directions, we built fake landing pages for potential services—one around financial management, another about flexibly renting spaces or tools. We showed these during in-person interviews, gauging reactions and refining our hypotheses until financial management emerged as the most pressing opportunity.
In weekly sprints, we moved from prototyping to building the application, continuously testing and co-creating with real users in homes, workplaces, and the lab.
