BENTAMOBILE

Aug 2015 - Jan 2018 | in collaboration with Joseph Rastrullo, Cedrick Donato, Julie Santos, Alessa Engalan, Nico Apuli, Dyem Carreon.

BentaMobile was a social design endeavor which aimed to respond to the pains and aspirations of informal street vendors by helping them become recognized members of the community, formalizing their businesses by conducting field research and routine immersions within local communities in the city of Manila and involving community stakeholders in the design of innovative solutions to social problems.

As a multidisciplinary team of designers , business people, marketers and app developers, we conducted fieldwork, stakeholder workshops, user tests and qualitative research to develop insights on formalizing the businesses of illegal street vendors in Manila (PH). We built relationships and co-designed a livelihood project which entailed a mobile food delivery app and social business ecosystem with multiple stakeholders, specifically informal street vendors and their local government.

EMPATHY: USER SURVEYS & INTERVIEWS

RESPONDENT INSIGHTS

• Informal business means that they are constantly bribing the police to let them stay and sell their product. This eats up their revenue.

• The general sentiment is that they are tired. They travel/commute long hours and distances everyday to buy fresh ingredients and take their street food carts to their selling venue yet revenue does not compensate their efforts.

• They cannot reach their ideal market; many vendors would like to sell to students but many are not allowed to sell within school/university premises, so they stay and sell inside small remote sparsely populated villages.

• Relationship building is vital because most of their business comes from their ‘suki’ or regular customers.

• Most street food vendors tend to be ‘reckless risktakers’ and would rather continue this way than look for a regular job because they like to be their own boss.

ENVIRONMENT SURVEY

USER JOURNEY

INTERFACE

USER TESTING KEY INSIGHTS

• Toggle bar for product availability proved to be a necessity during the tests, given the precarity of street food inventory.

• Star ratings and reviews were important not only for aiding customer decision-making but also vendor motivation. This drove product trust and quality.

• Being able to do basic accounting in the app was a game-changer because most vendors had very little to no financial education.

• As it turns out, vendors are relatively playful when taking images of their products; there might be potential to explore a more social/collaborative app feature in the future.