RedX App

What is RedX

When working with the deepAfrica team, George, our team leader, came up with a fun way for the team to maintain basic office etiquette. Rules like getting late to work or meetings, leaving a messy kitchen after a snack, leaving the lights on or swearing would earn you a penalty of 100 Kenyan Shillings (BTW, "Red" is an old slang word for 100 Shillings)

The way that you would be reported for a penalty is someone taking a picture as evidence of the offence. Reported offenders would need to pay the fine within 24 hours of it being reported. Evidence of payment would be required and this would involve someone else other than the offender taking a picture of the offender paying the money in the RedX jar.

At the end of the month, the total amount in the jar would be calculated and the winnings awarded to the person with the least offences in the office.

The whole premise of RedX is trying to help people in the office be more disciplined by awarding the ones with the most discipline and penalising the ones who are not very disciplined. All while not requiring any direct supervision from a leader since the team monitors itself.

We used a WhatsApp Group as the way to manage the offences and payments and would post pictures of the offences and people paying their fines.

The RedX App

Managing this system manually had a couple of challenges:

1. Figuring out who is the winner required that the team leader calculate all the offences and all payments made throughout the month. This was difficult, time consuming and error prone.
2. There was no reminder system that helped the offender know that they had a RedX and how long they had to pay for it.
3. There was no way of knowing who was winning or the rankings of each person in the team until the very end of the month. This meant that it would be difficult for you to improve your behaviour if you are last in line until you discovered that you were the worst offender at the end of the month.
4. Tracking the fines and offences manually was taxing and hard to follow if there were a lot of offences by the end of a day
5. There was no way of telling how much cash there was in the jar without removing the money and counting it.

Product Features

To address these challenges, I was asked to design an app that would help the team:

1. Report offences through the app and have the app notify the offender that they needed to settle the offence.
2. Post the evidence of their payment and possibly collect digital payments.
3. Keep a ranking of the entire team throughout the month and display the rankings to everyone clearly so that each person is able to trace where they stand
4. Calculating the winnings of the month and choosing the person who won based on a customisable set of rules.
5. Remind people about their unsettled penalties and any fines so that they can pay for them and avoid high late fees.
6. Know how much money the jar has at any time to help keep the office accountable.

The Design Process

1.  🤔 Ideation

Since the RedX concept had been run for several years using a WhatsApp group, The first step I took in the design process is to hold a brainstorming session with the team to understand the functionalities that were most critical for the first iteration. We agreed that the features were:

1. The ability to create a new penalty and add the person responsible for it.
2. Listing of penalties with the person responsible.
3. Managing and Displaying of penalty statuses (whether a penalty is paid for or not)
4. The ability to report payment for a penalty through taking a picture of the person adding their payment in the jar
5. Realtime Ranking of the team based on how many offences you have (Negative indicator) and how many people you have reported on the system (Positive indicator)

I also came up with user personas for the different users that would be using the application: