crafting a better, future-proof navigation for the yoco merchant app.

I laid the foundations by prototyping and testing simpler information architectures directly with Yoco merchants. I ran the original navigation and new ideas past new and existing customers with paper prototypes and scenario walkthroughs, then built a beta — a platform-default bottom bar and a new dashboard screen — and tested feature discovery against the old app in control groups of increasing size. I packaged the findings and the resulting design and presented back to the team and stakeholders with recommendations.

 

The core move was to return to a familiar bottom bar and add a landing screen, shown when the user isn't in a sales flow, that could carry vital messaging timed to their lifecycle — with the app always returning to the last visited screen as an overarching rule. This was the first time we used the native app as a communications channel, so we set rules to govern it: augment existing CRM efforts to help people get set up, without being pushy, and never show news or lifestyle content inside a tool someone is using to run their business. It's a work environment, and the design had to respect that.

 

We rolled it out behind feature flags to portions of the user base over time, so we could learn and adjust as we went, tracking the impact on feature discovery and on the prompts meant to help people along the way.