MusawoLink

MusawoLink is a two-sided mobile app for healthcare staffing in Uganda. Clinics, hospitals, and pharmacies post short-notice shifts. Verified nurses, midwives, and pharmacy techs nearby can claim them and get paid through mobile money — usually within 48 hours.

I built it as a solo project to learn how to design for a market I know. I worked in Ugandan healthcare for seven years before becoming a designer and wanted to put my UX practice into one focused, end-to-end product. "Musawo" means clinician in Luganda.

Across Kampala and the surrounding districts, private clinics, pharmacies, and rural health posts run on improvised staffing. A midwife calls a friend, who calls a colleague, and a 10pm shift gets filled at 9:47pm. The cost of that improvisation is real — missed shifts, unverified credentials, and a junior nurse moving across town for a three-hour call-in.

There's no shortage of healthcare workers. There's a coordination problem.

I worked in Ugandan healthcare for seven years — one in a hospital, two in a medical centre, four in a pharmacy. For research, I went back to former colleagues across all three settings and listened.

1. 01

   Trust comes before software.

   Facilities trusted referrals through colleagues, not platforms. Verification — license, training, references — had to feel airtight before any feature mattered.

2. 02

   Bandwidth is a design constraint, not a wishlist item.

   Most users are on 3G with patchy coverage. The app had to load fast, queue actions when offline, and never gate the core flow on a heavy upload.

3. 03

   Money moves through mobile money, slowly and informally.

   Bank rails are a non-starter. Any flow that delayed payouts beyond 48 hours would lose professionals to phone-call work.

I broke the experience into three surfaces, each with a single job. Onboarding and verification live outside this loop and are intentionally heavier — they're the only place I ask for friction, because trust is the whole product.

The post-a-shift form was where I was most worried about friction. Facility managers post shifts at the worst possible moment — late, stressed, often during another emergency. I wanted to know if the form I'd designed felt as fast as a phone call.

I ran an unmoderated study in Maze with facility managers. The task: post a shift in under 60 seconds. The heatmap revealed something specific — users were clicking the right edges of dropdown fields, expecting them to expand. The Quantity-of-workers field had the highest abandonment rate. Nobody knew what to put.

The final flow for the professional side: open shift → details → claim → confirmation → active shift → payout. Three taps from open shift to claim. Pay, distance, and shift type are visible in the first card so the decision happens before the tap.