Zedafrica

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the managing partner of a law firm.

For what projects/services did your company hire Zedafrica, and what were your goals?

We are a middle sized company and we hired them to create a website and manage our IT services.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We hired them because of their consistency delivery to law firms in Kenya. They understand the market and they are efficient in time and quality of work.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We had a series of meetings in which the scope of work and deliverables were agreed upon.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We worked with six people from the Vendor and their positions ranged from the project manager to the IT Specialists

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

After launching the website, we received increased traffic and positive feedback. The website accounts for 15 percent of our client referrals which is quite high in the Kenyan Legal Market.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

The project managing style was hands on. Communication styles included email, WhatsApp and direct communication.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their efficiency, timeliness, and dedication were impressive.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

The negotiations for the price could have been done faster.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of technology and product development for an organization called Outside The Box Africa Limited — a software development company with over 11 years of experience in the African continent. We specialize in process automation and ERP solutions.
 

What challenge were you trying to address with Zedafrica?

Our business has two main areas: an enterprise division and a consumer and SaaS division. The enterprise division deals with enterprise projects for customers and the SaaS division deals with research and design for products. 

We've been working with Zedafrica across both divisions to implement solutions for different clients. They mainly come in to implement and give direction on the UI/UX component.
 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Zedafrica has been helping us with branding, graphic design, product design, and UX for user journeys. The deliverables mostly center around coming up with a brand identity. For example, for a new product or a new client they will help build out the entire brand identity, develop a brand guide and brand book, and so forth.

At the start of a project, we usually share our software requirements or specifications that include some high-level information about the design. They then come up with the wireframes and prototypes and then pass it to our social developers to build on it.

They’ve also been building HTML templates for the products we deliver, which includes coming up with prototypes using Figma. They do this so we can assess to see if the user journeys that we've designed are being achieved through the designs we proposed.

We have a product called one-stoponline.com and Zedafrica essentially came up with the ideas behind the UX and product design of that solution.

They also offered frontend development for the Northern Corridor and Central Corridor performance dashboard toolset. The Northern and Central Corridors are both trade certification organizations that support the performance and monitoring of trade routes in East Africa. The Northern Corridor deals with the trade route from Mombasa to Congo, while the Central Corridor deals with the trade route from Dar es Salaam to Congo. For this, Zedafrica was mostly involved in the frontend development.

Apart from that, Zedafrica also created our website design and we work with them for our products and our internal needs.

Of late, we've been working very closely with them for our product development for our consumer and SaaS division. They’ve been instrumental in delivering the UX/UI and helping with all product design elements for some of our anchor products in the SaaS market. 

What is the team composition?

We work closely with about 4–5 people, including a product designer, around three junior designers, and one frontend developer.

How did you come to work with Zedafrica?

We originally met them through a friend because we're both based in Kenya. We decided to work with them because they had a very good track record. We also liked the work they had done for previous clients through referrals.

How much have you invested with them?

On average, we spend about $6,000–$10,000 per project. The most we've ever spent on a project is around $11,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together around the first quarter of 2014 and our partnership is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

User adoption is one of the key metrics that we look at, which has been quite good. The reason we've been working with Zedafrica for so long is because we can easily attribute our user adoption rate to the UX and software solutions that our users interact with.

In general, we’re satisfied with the designs and all the support that they're providing. The feedback from clients has mostly been very positive — they really love the design and the UX of all the solutions that we provide. We have experienced some bugs and crashes, but those are usually resolved within a few days.

How did Zedafrica perform from a project management standpoint?

In terms of meeting deadlines, I think they’ve been quite fair. Of course, there are times when project deadlines have not been met, but that's more attributed to a lot of feedback loops.

For project management, we onboard any contractor or employee on Asana to be able to track tasks and activities. We also have a Slack channel where we interact with the Zedafrica team.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have a very keen eye for detail and they really emphasize minimalist, easy-to-understand, intuitive solutions. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

Perhaps they can better engage more difficult clients to catch the requirements. This would revolve more around people management and dealing with difficult clients, which can sometimes relate to the challenging feedback loops. As much as our team tried to improve that from our project management side, Zedafrica could also get their individual members to improve it, as well. Apart from that, everything is fine.

Any advice for potential customers?

Give them creative freedom. Creative freedom is very important for Zedafrica because we realized when they have that creative freedom, they are able to build some of the best solutions.