Ayoba Mobile App Design
My role:
Senior UI/UX Designer
Ayoba is a super app offering a wide range of functionalities, including messaging, music streaming, article reading, gaming, and payments. As the product and company scaled, I was brought on as a Senior UI/UX Designer to drive product enhancements, improve usability, and support growth through feature design, design system improvements, and user-centred solutions.
What was done
As a Senior UI/UX Designer at Ayoba, I led product enhancements aligned with key business goals such as increasing customer acquisition, improving user retention, and driving monetisation.
My work focused on feature additions, usability improvements, design upgrades, and design governance (documentation and reviews), with ownership from concept through delivery.
Feature Additions
I was responsible for the end-to-end design of new features, including ideation, strategy, research synthesis, interaction design, and visual execution, working closely with product and engineering teams. A few I'd like to highlight are:
Podcasts
To broaden Ayoba’s audience and support customer acquisition, the team explored integrating podcasts into the app. Following initial viability research by the user research team, I led the definition of the podcast experience.
My responsibilities included:
Defining the design strategy and feature vision
Contributing to the product roadmap
Evaluating implementation approaches (off-the-shelf vs. custom build)
Translating research insights into user personas
Designing end-to-end user flows and process flows
Creating UI designs aligned with the existing design system, including new components where needed
Collaborating with product managers, developers, and product owners to ensure feasibility and alignment
Overseeing the design of branding and launch assets for the podcast feature
This work resulted in a scalable podcast experience that aligned with Ayoba’s product vision, design system, and growth objectives.
Message reminders
During user research, we uncovered an insight that, while not directly related to the original investigation, proved highly valuable: users often forget to respond to messages or miss notifications. In some cases, this led to real-life consequences, highlighting a clear need for message reminders.
I was responsible for designing and integrating the Message reminders feature within the existing messaging experience. This required carefully balancing new functionality with established patterns to ensure the experience remained seamless, intuitive, and non-disruptive for existing users.
My responsibilities included:
End-to-end design of the feature, including user flows and interactions
Assessing technical feasibility in collaboration with engineering
Designing for existing user groups and usage behaviours
Defining edge cases and error states
Designing for both Android and iOS, ensuring cross-platform consistency
Ensuring accessibility and usability across devices
Throughout the process, I collaborated closely with developers, researchers, product managers, and product owners to ensure alignment on expectations, feasibility, and product goals.
Notifications hub
As a super app with multiple services, Ayoba generates a high volume of notifications. Users lacked a central place to review and prioritise notifications, while the business needed to maintain visibility and engagement without overwhelming or exploiting user attention.
I led the design of a dedicated notifications vertical that streamlined push notifications and introduced a notification hub where users could evaluate what deserved their attention.
My process included:
Auditing notifications across the app and identifying all notification types
Reviewing notification patterns in comparable products
Creating a process map documenting triggers, destinations, and expected user actions
Categorising notifications using priority and frequency
Facilitating a design workshop to define rules and principles for notifications
Building a centralised database of notification types, copy, and tap behaviour
Designed custom components and explored multiple visual and interaction variations
Balanced business visibility with usability and ethical attention design
Ensured the experience was scannable, engaging, and scalable across the app
The resulting notifications vertical provided users with clarity and control, while offering the business a structured, scalable system for managing notifications across Ayoba’s ecosystem.
Usability Improvements
I regularly conducted usability audits focused on specific features or end-to-end journeys, identifying friction points and implementing design improvements based on user and behavioural insights.
Key usability improvements I led included:
Message Reply Interactions: Designed the interface and interaction patterns for replying to previously sent messages, accounting for all message and attachment types, with a strong focus on accessibility and clarity.
Link Previews in Chat: Designed the experience for pasting Ayoba links into chat, transforming raw URLs into rich previews (e.g. stories, posts, and other content types). This included designing all supported asset types and link variations.
Error States & System Feedback: Designed clear and informative error states for scenarios such as server delays and unexpected network disconnections, ensuring users understood what was happening and how to recover.
Empty States & Permissions: Created meaningful empty states for situations where content could not be fetched or when required permissions were not granted, guiding users toward next steps instead of dead ends.
Settings Optimisation: Improved the usability of settings pages by removing duplication and redundancy, resulting in a more intuitive and streamlined experience.
These improvements collectively enhanced usability, accessibility, and system transparency across core messaging and platform experiences.
Design Upgrades
I led design upgrades across flows, pages, and components to better align the product with Ayoba’s design system and established design standards. This work focused on reinforcing users’ mental models while improving consistency, usability, and accessibility.
By refining existing patterns and standardising components, I helped ensure a cohesive look and feel across all touch-points, creating a more intuitive and unified product experience.
Design Governance
I actively contributed to the evolution of the design system by creating, refining, and maintaining components, and ensuring they were applied consistently and correctly across the product. This included identifying and eliminating duplicated or outdated design documentation, improving clarity and reducing design debt.
I maintained detailed design logs and version histories to document decisions, trade-offs, and context, helping teams understand not just what changed, but why. This practice supported continuity across projects and improved handovers.
Beyond system maintenance, I fostered a collaborative design culture by encouraging knowledge sharing between design, product, and engineering teams, ensuring alignment and strengthening cross-functional workflows.
Why was it done
With an estimated 30 million monthly active users, Ayoba needed to continue growing organically while maintaining a high-quality experience for its existing user base. To support this, the product team continuously evaluated opportunities to improve core experiences, reduce friction, and introduce new value that would encourage retention and acquisition.
Design work was therefore driven by three primary goals:
Improving the experience for existing users by increasing usability, accessibility, and consistency
Attracting new users through meaningful feature additions and clearer value propositions
Monetising select areas of the product without compromising trust or user experience
All design decisions (whether feature enhancements, usability improvements, or system upgrades) were made in service of balancing business growth with long-term user value.
How was it done
My approach combined user-centred design, research insights, and cross-functional collaboration to create meaningful, scalable product experiences. I started by understanding the problem (through user research, analytics, and audits) then translated insights into clear design strategies, flows, and visual solutions.
I designed end-to-end experiences with a focus on usability, accessibility, and consistency, ensuring that new features or improvements fit seamlessly into existing patterns. I collaborated closely with product managers, researchers, and engineers to assess technical feasibility, align on goals, and iterate efficiently.
Across projects, I maintained design system integrity by creating and refining components, documenting decisions, and sharing knowledge across teams. This ensured that all touch-points were cohesive, intuitive, and scalable, while keeping the user experience and business objectives in balance.
Conclusion
Ayoba has been absorbed into its parent company MTN, and incorporated into a new platform.