Designing for a global audience

I led user research strategy & usability testing to discover product and design insights during a 7 day trip to Lagos, Nigeria. This was followed by a design sprint to address pain points ahead of go-to-market efforts.

A photo of Victoria Island & the mainland! See if you can spot a classic yellow bus taxi :)

Why did we do this?

In past years, we’ve consistently seen high volumes of user activity in Nigeria. Compared to other regions, users in Nigeria were initiating more transactions and engaging with invitation & 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

We completed 17 user interviews from three cohorts to understand current & potential future Valora users

User Research

  1. Valora users

  2. Crypto users who don’t use valora

  3. 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

Primary Pain Point

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 opted to make small, immediate changes now, and incorporate proposed improvements into future roadmaps

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.