Designing a crypto-based international payment service for Nigerians
📍 LOCATIONLagos, Nigeria
💡 DISCIPLINEService Design, UX Design
🏅 ROLEDesign Lead
What service are we providing?
WHAT IS VALORA?
Valora is a mobile crypto wallet that allows users to save, send and trade stablecoins.
Stablecoins are a special type of cryptocurrency whose value is tied to a government’s currency, often USD or Euro, and can serve as a hedge against inflation or other volatility in value.
WHAT IS FIATCONNECT?
To provide the infrastructure for this service, the team built FiatConnect — an open API standard that makes it easy for local financial operators anywhere in the world to plug into Valora, so users could top up their balance or withdraw funds to their local bank account without Valora needing to integrate each operator individually.
How it works
Wallets are only useful if you can get funds in and out. We built Fiatconnect so that third party service providers who already integrate with local banks can integrate with the API and provide purchasing infrastructure to wallets like Valora. The funding for this project came through the Celo Foundation.
Valora needs these providers because without them, users hit a dead end when they need to use their crypto in the real world. Providers using the Fiatconnect benefit from increased transaction volume.
Research
Myself and our small cross-functional team spent 6 days on Victoria Island, conducting 17 user interviews and 5 partnership meetings with local Fiatconnect service providers
Research objectives
VALIDATE POSITIVE MARKET SIGNALSAfter launching Fiatconnect in January 2023, our quantitative research showed that Nigeria surpassed the US and Latin America in transactions per users.
TALK TO REAL PEOPLEWe wanted to gather cultural and financial context and determine if & where our service and application were breaking down.
Qualitative interviews
CURRENT VALORA USERSUsers who were already using Valora, and who could give feedback on the designed experience, and tell us what was & wasn’t working well.
INTEGRATION FEEDBACK
CRYPTO-LITERATE POTENTIAL USERSPeople who are actively using other products. We wanted to know what was working well for them and where we could have a competitive edge in the market.
Partnership meetings
Providers gave critical feedback on their pain points when integrating with the Fiatconnect API.
REGULATORY INSIGHT
We learned about challenges in the regulatory landscape, and workarounds that the teams used to provide crypto based services to the Nigerian people.
STRENGTHEN LOCAL PARTNERSHIPSMeet and build relationships with FiatConnect cash-in/out providers operating in Lagos.
NON-USERS WITH BANK ACCOUNTS
We wanted to learn from people who used other digital banking interfaces, but had trust barriers toward crypto despite some familiarity.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
Connecting with local teams more casually, at dinner or while watching live music, gave us a sense of how to connect with an audience that we had not previously built for.
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
We discovered that fee inaccuracy (& resulting confusion) discouraged users from completing transactions
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.
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.