Role: Founding Product Designer

Client Name: Comutta

Industry: Mobility

Scope: Client Mobile App, Fleet Mobile App, Admin Web App, Design System

Year: 2024

I was the founding product designer for Comutta, a peer-to-peer car rental platform connecting people who need vehicles with car owners looking to earn from idle cars. I led the design of three platforms, renters app, car owners app, and an admin web app, all designed from scratch.

In Nigeria, traditional car rentals are expensive and require office visits, while ride-hailing gets costly for full-day trips. Meanwhile, car owners have vehicles sitting idle with no safe way to monetize them. The market needed a trusted, mobile-first solution that worked for both sides without a physical middleman.

I interviewed 12 people across Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt, split between renters and car owners, and analyzed competitors like Uber, Bolt, and InDrive.

The core insight, trust mattered more than features. Users needed verification, transparency, and control before they'd feel comfortable transacting peer-to-peer with a stranger's vehicle.

This shaped the target audience, professionals seeking affordable car access, owners looking to monetize idle vehicles, and people needing temporary transportation for events or trips.

Scoping for a Ten-Week Timeline I had ten weeks to design three platforms, so I had to be strategic about where I spent time. I focused on building trust into the core interactions and creating a design system that could hold up as the product grew. Features like insurance integration and referral systems were pushed to later. The priority was getting booking, listing, and the admin tools right first, since those were what operations would depend on from day one.

Verification Gated at the Point of Risk Renters could browse freely, but they needed ID verification before they could actually book a car. That way, the friction shows up right when it matters, when someone's about to commit to a real transaction, instead of at the very start, where it would just scare people off before they'd even seen what the app offers.

Owner-Controlled Booking Approval Owners could choose between instant booking or manual approval, based on how comfortable they felt. Not every owner trusts the platform the same amount on day one, so this let that trust build up naturally over time instead of forcing everyone into one way of doing things.

Admin Tools Built for Trust The admin dashboard handled things like user verification, dispute resolution, and fraud detection from the very start. That meant trust and safety were part of the foundation, not something added in later once problems came up.

The challenging part was designing for two opposing mindsets at once, renters wanted speed, owners wanted control, while keeping the system scalable for the admin team managing it, all within a compressed timeline that demanded prioritizing validated fundamentals over full feature coverage.

Usability testing with 15 participants showed 80% completing booking and listing flows without assistance. The design is complete and currently in development. The bigger win wasn't the three platforms themselves, it was building a foundation flexible enough to evolve based on real user feedback rather than trying to perfect everything upfront.