It is interesting that sometimes it’s not the most robust and well designed solutions that get picked up by consumers. Great design of course is something of great importance when designing a piece of software, an app or a website. And clients will gravitate to well designed (graphically, not in terms of user experience), well tested and robust services. But sometimes, it seems, it’s enough that something simply works!

Africa is a bit of a late-comer to the internet. Since the .com boom and bust, the internet has evolved and grown in leaps and bounds. It’s only a few years ago that the term Web 2.0 emerged, giving an identity to what the web had evolved into. In terms of technology, particularly on the software side, much has come about. There are a myriad of frameworks for developing robust web applications and web services based on a wide array of standards.

The technology today affords the creation of some great looking web apps with solid engineering behind them. At the turn of the millenium, the websites were pretty well, boring, at least as compared to the standard today. Even, a person with little or no programming knowledge can create a great looking website in a few minutes using WordPress or other such blog and CMS platforms.

Yet it still occurs that at times consumers do not turn to the most well designed website to satisfy their needs. Sometimes it just boils down to who was first to market and who is offering a service that works, and one that works without failing.

Back in 2008/9 one of the suggestions going around within Kenyan tech-circles about how easy it is to create a ‘Kenyan’ Craigslist and how it would be quite easy to make it pretty successful. Craigslist is one of those few websites that survived through the .com boom/bust period. But one pretty amazing thing about Craigslist is that, at face-value, it’s not a work of genius in terms of graphic design. It is actually at best, simply a list. And it works, people use it, and they’re making money off it.

Here in Kenya there are two very popular websites that prove this point both owned by Cheki Africa Media. Cheki.co.ke (currently ranked 49th in Kenya on Alexa, top 10 locally) is a used cars website and brightermonday.com (Currently ranked  45th on Alexa among all sites visited by Kenyans and top 10 locally) is a jobs site. Both do not have what one might consider stunning graphic design even compared to other players in the same market, but both have become probably the leaders in their industries and have expanded to other East African countries and even to Nigeria. Both sites provide a very specific service and do a great job at what they’re made for.

In Nigeria, Nairaland is ranked as the 10th most popular website and 2nd among local websites by Alexa. Nairaland is a basic online discussion forum. Nothing fancy.

Question is, why does it happen that at times the successful site is not the greatest looking one? If you’re planning to create a web offering in Africa there are some important lessons here.

First to market

Africa is Rising. And technology is the main engine. Things are also happening fast! There are many opportunities to offer online services that have not yet been tried in different regions of Africa but those opportunities are being filled up fast! People are seeing the gaps and filling them.

So, sometimes it’s best not to get stuck on getting everything right as far as look and feel go but of more importance would be getting into the market fast, first and with a product that works, hence raking in the customers and possible revenues before competition shows up. Then work from there, you can add on great graphic design afterwards. Just make sure you have a solid product, that’s scaleable. You can add on the great graphics work later – that’s why you iterate in product development.

If you are offering a great service, and customers catch on and engage with your service, it is unlikely that they’ll jump ship when someone else comes by who’s offering exactly what you are offering with a better looking skin on it.

User Experience Design trumps Graphic Design

As far as design goes, it’s NOT wise to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Don’t just cobble up something and serve it to the customer and say, “Hey, it works!”. You may not want to hold up the product because of the graphic design side of things but user experience is everything. If you’re going to spend time on design, spend as much of it as you can on getting aspects of user experience and user interaction just right.

Mobile Web Rules in Africa Design Specifically for it

In Africa, it’s worth noting that most internet consumers do not have the luxury of the full scale desktop browser experience. Much of Africa’s internet usage is via mobile phone. In Kenya, for example, statistics have shown that 99% of internet access is done via mobile. And as far as mobile web browsers go, in Africa, Opera Mini is probably the standard.

Therefore it would be wise to invest in creating a custom site for mobile, or making your website mobile friendly. As far as web design for mobile goes, the cardinal principle is to minimize. Minimize on the number of graphics you have, minimize on the number of actions a user needs to do or number of pages it takes to accomplish a task.

Conclusion

It’s better that it works than it looks great but doesn’t work. All the same there is a minimum as far as design goes, it may work but it may look really awful. So get the balance, but don’t be over-concerned about getting the perfect graphic design on the first iteration. Andrew Mugoya recently published an ebooklet titled ‘Help, I am a developer with no clue about design – 6 1/2 tips for developers with no access to designers‘ that’s targeted at developers who can’t get dedicated resources for design that could help get the minimum as far as design is concerned. The simple tips in this book offer simple, practical ideas for the minimum as far as design goes.