Cred Book: Online ledger application
User Experience and Interface Design
Sponsored by IIT Bombay
Project Lead: Ashutosh Sharma and Yogesh Aggarwal
Engineering: Devyani Dacha
Designer: Bipasha Ray
Most people in rural India purchase daily necessities from their local stores. It is typical for business owners to maintain track of their regular payments and charge them at the end of each month. This benefits the people as well as store owners because they attract loyal customers. Since their ledger system relies on the conventional pen-paper approach, the majority of these bills are written by hand.
While collaborating with a fantastic team from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Bombay), I had the opportunity to participate in their research and create an interface for a digital ledger system called 'Cred Book'
We started by introducing a ledger system but have the vision to add features of that make Cred Book a one-stop solution for accounting and loans.
This project can also be viewed on Figma.
Like Shiv’s store, there are ~12 million mom & pop stores based in rural India alone. These shops account for 90% of Indian retail and FMCG revenues. However, due to the traditional ‘pen-paper’ methods, most of the transaction history is lost. Store owners like Shiv get deprived of different Government funded benefits and loan opportunities due to a lack of proper documentation.
We interviewed a focus group of 10 shop owners to understand the different issues they are facing with their ledger system. We understood that most of them were either unaware of the many digital methods or didn’t think it was simple enough to train new employees. They wanted customisable features which most other ledger applications did not have.
Opportunity for digital intervention
With multinationals like Google taking initiatives to enable better WiFi and connectivity in rural areas, the internet consumption gap between urban and rural areas has started closing up.
We saw the opportunity to create a digital solution as our target audience was very effective with social media applications like Facebook and WhatsApp. We did not want to introduce any practice or feature in our solution that our user was not familiar with. Our aim was to not build new habits. Our vision was to build a new system but also keep it comfortably familiar.
The multiple languages, large fonts, and vibrant colours were purposefully selected to meet the requirements of our user's age range (45-65 years)
With smart in-app notifications by Cred book, store owners like Shiv stay updated with their targets, feel assured, and are better prepared.
Cred Book was highly appreciated by the users during the primary testing. Cred Book now awaits its initial funding and will be ready to launch its first prototype by the end of 2023.
Our next steps involved introducing a reward system for the shop owners and the customers to incentivize the use of the app. Including QR scanning to avoid manual entry of goods. In the future, we envision ‘Cred Book’ to be more than just being a ledger noting application to a lending & payments alternative.
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Radix Value Deck
Next project:
Home Pound