Western design systems were not built for African users. Until we stop pretending otherwise, our products will keep failing the people they claim to serve.
Quick Brief
- Western design systems were not built for African users.
- Until we stop pretending otherwise, our products will keep failing the people they claim to serve.
- They assume the user knows what a hamburger menu means.
- It is failing at the door, because the door was designed for someone else.
Keep reading for the full breakdown on African design — everything you need to know is covered below.
There is a particular kind of arrogance baked into how we build digital products in Africa. Not the arrogance of founders – most are brilliant, restless, genuinely hungry to solve hard problems. The arrogance is quieter than that. It lives in the design files.
It shows up every time a team opens Figma, drops in a Material Design component, and ships a product to Lagos or Accra without once asking whether those components were built with their users in mind. They were not.
The default assumption across much of the African tech ecosystem is that good design is a universal language – that a button is a button, a form is a form, and if it works in San Francisco it will work in Nairobi. That assumption is quietly destroying products that deserved to survive.
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The Context Gap Nobody Talks About
Consider what the average African smartphone user actually brings to a digital product. They may be navigating an interface in their second or third language. Their connection is intermittent – 3G on a good day, USSD on a bad one. Their device has 2GB of RAM and a screen that has seen better days. They have not grown up with the same visual grammar that Silicon Valley designers treat as instinct.
Western design systems were stress-tested against none of this. Google’s Material Design and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines were built for high-literacy, high-bandwidth, English-first environments. They assume the user knows what a hamburger menu means. They assume loading states will resolve in under a second. They assume error messages do not need to account for the possibility that the user cannot read them fluently.
These are not small assumptions. They are the load-bearing walls of every component library that African product teams paste into their work without a second thought.
The most dangerous design decision you can make is treating someone else’s context as your own.
When Borrowed Design Meets Real Life
M-PESA did not succeed because it was beautiful. It succeeded because it was designed around how Kenyans already moved money – informally, relationally, on feature phones, through agents at the corner shop. It was not a product exported from elsewhere and localised with a flag icon. It was built from the ground up around a specific human truth.
That is not the norm. Across the continent, fintech platforms routinely ship onboarding flows that assume users have a permanent home address in a format a Western database will accept. E-commerce platforms display prices in ways that create cognitive friction for users who think in local denominations. KYC flows designed for users with passports and utility bills exclude the majority of the people these products claim to serve.
The numbers bear this out. Research into fintech product performance consistently finds that poor onboarding design – confusing KYC flows, vague error messages, assumptions of prior digital experience – drives abandonment rates above 60 percent. The product is not failing because the idea was bad. It is failing at the door, because the door was designed for someone else.
This Is Not an Infrastructure Problem
Here is where the conversation usually goes wrong. People hear this critique and assume the answer is better internet coverage, cheaper devices, or improved digital literacy programmes. Those things matter. But they are not the root problem.
The root problem is that African product designers – many of them extraordinarily talented – are being trained to see Western frameworks as the default and local context as the exception to accommodate. That inversion has to be reversed.
Design thinking, when it is actually practised rather than just labelled, starts with the user. Not the average user. Not the assumed user. The actual person who will open this product on a Thursday afternoon in Ibadan or Mombasa or Accra, with whatever device they have, in whatever state their connection is in, bringing whatever prior experience they carry.
Studios like YUX Design in Senegal are demonstrating what this looks like at scale – rooting product decisions in behavioural research and social science specific to African markets, not borrowed from elsewhere. They are not the exception. They should be the template.
African designers are not behind. They are solving harder problems with fewer resources and less structural support – that is not a deficit, that is an advantage waiting to be named.
What Locally-Rooted UX Actually Requires
It requires designers who treat user research as a non-negotiable line item, not a nice-to-have when budget allows. It requires product teams who can articulate the difference between a design pattern that is familiar and one that is appropriate. And it requires a design culture that treats context as the starting point, not an afterthought.
Concretely, it means rethinking components from first principles – not just changing the colour palette and calling it localised. It means designing for low-bandwidth states as primary, not edge-case. It means error messages written in plain language that respects varying literacy levels. It means building flows that accommodate informal address structures, multiple languages within a single session, and the reality that trust in a digital product often has to be earned faster than it does for Western counterparts, because users have more to lose and fewer safety nets if something goes wrong.
It also means African designers and product leaders having the confidence to push back when a stakeholder defaults to ‘let’s just do what X app did.’ X app was not built for your user.
The Stakes Are Not Abstract
Africa’s digital economy is accelerating faster than most people outside the continent fully appreciate. Mobile money transactions across Sub-Saharan Africa now exceed 830 billion dollars annually. Fintech accounts for more than 40 percent of all startup funding on the continent. The infrastructure is being built right now, in real time.
The question is whether that infrastructure will be built around the people it is meant to serve, or around borrowed assumptions about who those people are and how they behave. The answer depends, in large part, on the design decisions being made in product studios across the continent today.
We have a narrow window to get this right. The patterns we set now – in design systems, in component libraries, in the way we run user research, in what we treat as a default versus an exception – will shape digital experiences for hundreds of millions of people for a generation.
That is not a small thing. Design is not decoration. It is the difference between a product that works for the people who need it and one that works for the people who built it. In Africa, we can no longer afford to confuse the two.
Emmanuel Olorundare (Pisco) is a Senior Product Designer based in Nottingham, UK, with a background spanning digital product design, UX, and construction management. He is a Design Advisor on the Tech Derby accelerator programme and teaches UX at PQP Plus.