Designing for a global audience
During a 7 day trip to Lagos, Nigeria - I conducted in depth user interviews with power users and potential users to discover potential pain points, and implemented UX changes ahead of a large scale go-to-market effort.
We also gained cultural insight over the financial and political challenges that users faced, so we could work with local partners and launch Valora’s marketing efforts with sensitivity in a foreign market.
Role:
Design Lead
Responsibilities:
Research strategy, Usability testing, Roadmapping, Design sprints, Product Design
A photo of Victoria Island & the mainland! See if you can spot a classic yellow bus taxi :)
Why did we do this?
Over the course of 2024, we had consistently seen high volumes of user activity in Nigeria. Compared to other regions, users in Nigeria were initiating more transactions and engaging with in-app referral & reward campaigns.
Business Goal
The team needed to know if Nigeria was a feasible target market and wanted insight on local partnerships, cultural sentiments around crypto and the legal landscape ahead of marketing efforts.
Product Goals
I wanted to learn about future feature opportunities & product design pain-points from active users. We were unable to schedule remote user testing due to time zone and platform restrictions.
The Team
I was joined on this trip by Laura, a Product Manager, and Arvin, a User Researcher. We also had a local fixer, Bade, help us navigate Lagos and who provided us with spectacular Afrobeats playlists.
We completed 17 user interviews from three cohorts to understand current & potential future Valora users
USER RESEARCH
Valora users
Crypto users who don’t use valora
Non-crypto users who have a bank account
Arvin & I conducting interviews at a coworking space in Victoria Island
We discovered that fee inaccuracy (& resulting confusion) discouraged users from completing transactions
KEY INSIGHT
The decimal system we were using in Valora was confusing to Nigerian users
Our system of commas & periods when denominating values for different currencies was misleading to the Nigerian audience.
Users complained about in-accurate fees & exchange rates
Valora was using the rate offered by google’s API, which did not match local “black market” exchange rates between Naira & USD. This led to confusion when estimating fees and increased friction for users completing withdraw & buy flows.
The design process
Prioritization
I worked closely with Laura, our Product Manager and two Engineering Leads to prioritize all other UX requests based on team bandwidth, time to launch & overall impact.
Metrics
We tracked a few metrics to understand the impact of design changes:
1) Cash in success rate
2) Unique users to select a provider from the Buy or Withdraw flows
User Journey Mapping
I revisited user journeys for core app flows & marked opportunities for better fee transparency
Iteration & Usability testing
I created multiple variants to visualize fees and ran options through usertesting.com to understand what was working best
Feedback and Refinement
To accurately get a sense of constraints, I worked with engineers & product to advocate for design changes that address the key pain point
Since the pandemic, digital payments have become the norm. But most people still carry around cash
We focused on withdrawal and pricing accuracy, to build trust in Valora and stay consistent with local payment partners.
FINAL DESIGNS
We updated how Naira was visualized in the app to include correct decimal places and local exchange rates
We felt this was important to change ahead of starting marketing efforts in Nigeria.
We clearly called out how much Naira a user would receive after a withdrawal
In usability testing, we saw that users were able to better conceptualize the transaction that they were completing.
Outcome
We launched go-to-market efforts successfully in August of 2024.
We continued to measure cash-in success rates throughout the marketing push, and optimized our in-product purchasing and withdrawal flows. Later in the year, another set of team members traveled to visit Lagos, and confirmed that our usability changes had been successful, with the majority of users able to successfully withdraw their funds.