Year

2020–2021

Role

Service Design · Product Design

Musa: the map before the app

Joined as employee #11. The Transporter App MVP shipped in 3 months, built by an external studio on my flows and usability tests. The service journey I designed supported the seed round, closed in under 12 months. Within 18 months, the operation reached 400+ clients, 3,000+ tons of waste collected and reused, 5+ transporter partners and 20+ drivers.

Musa service journey: an illustrated road connecting Generator, Transporter and Recycler, stage by stage, with the value each actor gets

3 months

to ship the MVP

<12 months

to the seed round

400+

clients in 18 months

3,000+ tons

of waste collected and reused

Context

Everything was still TBD

Musa wanted a world without waste, where materials are recovered and reused instead of sent to landfill. When I joined, there was a mission and no product scope. Three actors had to work as one system:

Generators: businesses producing waste
Transporters: drivers and fleet partners collecting it
Recyclers: facilities processing and reusing materials

My role covered UX and service design, visual design, and product coordination between an external brand agency and a development studio.

The Problem

Three problems

1No shared mental model.

Everyone had a different answer to "how does it work?" That made it hard to pitch partners, sell to clients or prioritize anything.

2The transporter side was fragile.

Drivers work under time, routes, paperwork, connectivity and safety constraints. Collection is where digital meets physical. If it failed, the whole service failed.

3Urgency to prove traction.

We had to go from discovery to something shippable fast enough to unlock investment.

Act 1

The journey

Discovery started on whiteboards: team workshops, actor and value mapping, and interviews with drivers, generators and recyclers.

Whiteboard planning grid with sticky notes on service stages: lead and diagnosis, online waste manifest, collection schedule and alerts, training videos, payments and reports

Pencil notes from a driver interview: routes per month, bag counts, and a first sketch of a collection screen with plus and minus buttons

Hand-drawn system sketch: route definition, transport, proof of delivery and GPS, with notes on the driver experience

From that, I designed the service journey: how technology connects Generator → Transporter → Recycler, stage by stage. It became the shared language of the company. We used it to align the team, to explain the service to partners and clients, and in conversations with investors.

Musa product journey: Generator, Transporter and Recycler lanes connected stage by stage, from diagnosis and proposal through collection, weighing, quality control, reporting and payment

The service journey grouped into four phases: diagnostic and proposal, collection and destination, quality control and weighing, report and billing. The collection phase is highlighted

Act 1 · Build

Building for the field

With the journey defined, I designed the core flows for the Transporter App and tested them with drivers before development.

The prototypes were brand-neutral on purpose. The rebrand was underway, and the test was about the flow, not the look.

Early wireframes of the Transporter App: route list to confirm, driver and vehicle assignment with a calendar, a monthly route summary, and a stop-by-stop route with bag counts

Usability test: a participant runs the prototype on a phone at a table, filmed by a camera on a tripod

Usability test: a participant taps through the prototype on a phone while a researcher films the session

Usability test: a researcher films a participant at a desk as he goes through the prototype

Usability tests with the prototype, before development. Every session recorded.

Prototype v1

One bag count per stop, turn-by-turn directions.

After the field test

A counter per waste type, a photo of the pickup spot, weight at the destination, and a direct chat with the route team.

What I designed for:

Linear, step-by-step collection. One stop, one task, under time pressure.
Minimal typing. Pre-filled data, photos instead of text, and a direct channel to the route team for edge cases.

The final UI was built by an external studio on top of these flows.

What the field taught us after launch. With the app live, we saw that many drivers' phones couldn't run it reliably. The company moved to company-provided tablets. It wasn't my call, but the reasons were UX ones: reliable hardware, and a bigger screen for waste categorization and route viewing.

Then a tablet was stolen. Hardware decisions are UX decisions in field operations.

A driver in his truck cab holding up the app on his own phone

The app on a phone mounted on the windshield, on the highway

Selfie on a collection route: Yuki in a Musa cap and face mask with two collection workers in green uniforms, next to the truck

Yuki crouching to apply a label to a waste bin at the warehouse, among stacked bins and bags

The app on the road, still on drivers' own phones. Me in the field with the collection team, and applying bin labels at the warehouse.

Act 2

From pitch to operating map

A year later, with a team of 20+, I evolved the journey into a service blueprint crossing every stage of the service with our product domains: weight, traceability, segregation, processing and sale of raw material. We presented it at our internal Demo Day to decide, together, where to focus the product effort next.

Service blueprint: service stages from sales, onboarding and collection to destination, sale, supply and finance, crossed with five product domains: weight, traceability, segregation, processing and sale of raw material

Click to open full size.Swipe to explore. Tap to open full size.

Demo Day: the product manager presents the printed service blueprint, taped across a long wall, to the team

Demo Day: our PM walking the team through the blueprint I designed.

Beyond

Beyond the driver app

Operational icon set for waste categories and field actions.

Before and after of client communication: an older operational report and collection-day message, then the redesigned WhatsApp collection schedule and monthly operational report with recycling rates and impact

Ops reports and WhatsApp templates, automated to scale with the client base.

Laptop showing the landing page for the Musa and Alelo partnership: the headline 'Leave your waste management to us', a branded waste container, and how the service works

Partnership landing page for Alelo. It later became their reference for other partnerships.

Key Learnings

What I learned

Design beyond the screen. The hardest problems weren't interface problems. The device, the route and how waste got separated mattered as much as the app.
Usable is the bar. Drivers adopted the app because it removed paperwork, not because they loved it. In operational tools, that's enough.
Service clarity unlocks everything. The app was rough. The map is what got us partners, investment and, a year later, a whole team pointing at the same wall.