We design better business software.
pondo is a UX design collective in Cape Town. We help enterprise teams ship products their users actually love, working with the major South African banks, insurers, and software product owners since 2015.
What we do
Enterprise UX, end to end.
We specialise in designing enterprise and workflow-driven B2B and B2C web and mobile products. Custom-build software, complex regulated environments, multi-platform delivery.
Enterprise specialists. We design enterprise and business software, not consumer apps.
Complex products. Over two decades of experience designing intricate, regulated, workflow-heavy systems.
Risk reduction. We design and test before you start the build, so misalignment doesn't burn budget.
Multi-industry. Banking, fintech, legal, HR, mining, telecoms, eCommerce, social impact.
Multi-platform. Web, mobile, back-office, dashboards. We design for all of them.
Bridging team. We connect business, design and development so handoffs stop being arguments.
Methodology-aligned. We work inside your existing project methodology, whatever it is.
How we work
Five phases. The user at every step.
We've spent over two decades refining a process that surfaces the right problems early and keeps users in the loop until launch. It looks like this.
Plan
What are we trying to achieve?
We start with the business question. The success criteria we agree on here become the yardstick for every later choice.
Artefacts
- Stakeholder interviews
- Project plan
- Success criteria
- Competitor scan
Gather
Context, problems, users
We talk to your users in their environment, and to your business about market and constraints. The output is a hypothesis list.
Artefacts
- User interviews
- Personas
- User journeys
- Hypothesis lists
Ideation
The creative bit. Solve the problem.
We diverge wide before we converge. Sketches and journeys, multiple competing directions, until the room can argue with the work.
Artefacts
- Problem statements
- Concept sketches
- Divergent directions
Build
Prototype, then refine. Make it better each time.
We pick the right fidelity for the question. Increasingly that's running code, prototyped alongside your engineers in their codebase.
Artefacts
- IA
- Wireframes
- Hi-fi mock-ups
- Interactive prototypes
- Running code
Test
With users and the business. Then loop back.
Moderated, contextual, hypothesis-driven. We watch real users meet the work and feed findings back to your engineers and ours.
Artefacts
- Test plans
- Moderated usability
- Click tests
- Insight reports
Engineers are in the room from Plan through Test. We loop back through Gather until users tell us it's right.
Clients
Companies we have worked with.
A selection of the clients we've designed for over two decades. Ask us for details about specific projects, and if we are permitted to, we'll be happy to walk you through them.
Selected work
Real systems. Real users.
A glimpse of products we've shaped, across the industries that need design rigour the most. Full case studies on request, NDAs permitting.
Industries
Where we work.
We've designed enterprise systems across every regulated industry that matters in the South African market, and several beyond it.
- Banking, financial services & fintech
- Insurance & wealth management
- Logistics & mining
- Human resources
- Legal practice management
- eCommerce, wallets & payments
- Telecoms & telephony
- Rapid development platforms
- Identity management & blockchain
- NGO support & social impact
Building something complex?
Tell us what you're working on. We'll come back within a working day.
Talk to us