What Does an Effective Product Design in Web 3 in Africa Look Like?

May 11, 2024

What Does an Effective Product Design in Web 3 in Africa Look Like?

May 11, 2024

Key Insights

Effective Web3 product design in Africa must incorporate cultural relevance and human-centric approaches through comprehensive market research, workshops, prototyping, and testing to cater to the continent’s diverse digital landscape.
There is a significant shortage of Web3 design talent in Africa compared to developers, leading companies to rely on costly outsourced design services. Local Web3 design firms like Web3D Media Inc and Crevatal are aiming to fill this gap.
Emphasizing moral economics and social impact, Web3 products in Africa should be built with core tenets of kindness, respect, and gratitude, focusing on creating genuine value and fairer business practices rather than exploiting users with low-value activities.

Primer

For most Africans, Web 3 is no longer a jargon. Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa have received a combined USD 88.5 million (70%) of blockchain funding in Africa in 2021. As a result, we’re witnessing an upsurge in the need for effective product designs in Web3, with emerging crypto hubs such as Lagos, Nairobi, and Johannesburg becoming attractive to investors and creators.

However, developers and designers are needed to build apps that will define the continent’s future by having a direct effect on its people. Since most applications are social-based, including healthcare, education, and agricultural products – user-friendliness alone isn’t enough. Africa’s digital landscape is diverse, and a one-size-fits-all copy pasted design cannot work. A compelling product design in Web3 for African markets must incorporate unique touchpoints. The conversation about cultural relevance is essential and is based on comprehensive market research, workshops, prototyping, and testing.

This way, human-centric designs for the market are understood by first interacting with users.

Web3 Product Design in Africa

An excellent place to start is to recognize that Africans are somewhat familiar with the term “Web 3” in the context of cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin. For example, Nigerians and South Africans comprehend Web3 better than those from big economies like the UK, US, Japan, and Germany (99% and 98%, respectively).

Unfortunately, there is also a need for more Web 3 design talent. The number of Web3 product designers is low compared to developers. As a result, companies contemplating joining this sector must rely on expensive outsourced design services unfamiliar with the industry. Conceptualizing ideas from gaming to customer loyalty NFTs need intuitive design instilled in them to gain traction. If these products offer a bit of Web2 user experience, they can promote fiat-to-crypto transfers and NFT payments.

In response, African-based Web 3 design firms like Web3D Media Inc (Web 3 animations and resources) and Crevatal (Web3 UX designs) are aiming to close this gap. Near Protocol, Afropolitan Nation, VALR, Ejara, Finna Protocol, and Nestcoin also offer numerous opportunities for African creators.

A Web3 app development process can be expensive due to the fragmented user experience. People are ready to come on board when a Web 3 product promises improved performance, but they will rapidly abandon it if it fails to deliver.

The ease of simplifying blockchain concepts and different user levels helps reduce information overload. Pilot tests should determine the ease of establishing a wallet, show transactions and balances, and communicate wait times clearly. But, having a limited pool of pilot participants with extensive product expertise is critical.

The region’s vibrant peer-to-peer (P2P) trading and retail market and use of cryptocurrencies in everyday financial activities contribute to their rising popularity. Thus, the P2P space is still young, but it is the most effective way to scale and attract more users. In these ecosystems, market growth is achieved through numerous physical activation campaigns, which come at a cost. But, they are the most effective in garnering user feedback.

Q&A Session about Product Design in Web3

We caught up with Bonnie Crofford, who blew our minds about product designing in Web3 for social-based brands in Africa. She has a conscience to design business models differently in what she calls the “Moral Economic Ecosystem.” In short, she emphasizes the need for advanced technologies to implement the new economics into current governance structures. Crypto and its derivatives now known as DeFi, which provides an effective means of doing so.

Governance shouldn’t be seen as “making puppets out of people.” Blockchain, in particular, has the potential to disrupt the status quo. It can help save millions and solve many problems across all government departments. As well as create fairer business practices. Thus, social impact design should be the design template for Africa. It is less dependent on external influences and emancipates the actual change for the majority.

Bonnie continues to reiterate that Web3 companies should build for the people. Africans need a ‘safe space’, and only Web3 offers tangible solutions to this. Through Moral Economics, the core tenets of design must be kindness, respectful, and gratitude. Ethics and integrity, being the mainstay of how we design products, help prevent toxic governance, especially in a decentralized web.

Her definition of social impact design questions many projects in the Defi and web3 space that claim social good for a game you have to play all day to earn a wage that’s the same as manual labor. That’s not “social good”! Instead, there is a risk of creating robots out of humans. Thus, most firms strive to make money from desperate people with silly games that offer no value to their lives. If you want customers, the youth who are at the forefront of Web3 must be given due attention to understand how they do things.

In conclusion, she believes that Africa must embrace holistic product design in Web3 projects. There is no need to implement solutions much more quickly. Even without external financing, Web3 offers a supporting ecosystem to build each other and one product at a time.