Building for Africa First: Lessons in Mobile-First Product Design

Most product design guidance assumes fast, stable connections and large screens. Building DollarAfya and DollarShamba for African users meant unlearning a lot of that.

Design for intermittent connectivity, not just mobile screens

"Mobile-first" usually just means a responsive layout. For us it meant offline-first data entry, aggressive local caching, and graceful sync — because a clinic nurse or farmer's connection can drop mid-task.

Every screen has a data-cost budget

We track how many kilobytes each screen consumes, because for many users a session of app use has a real, felt cost against a limited data bundle. Heavy images and auto-playing content are treated as bugs, not features.

WhatsApp is often the real interface

For many African users, WhatsApp is more familiar and trusted than a standalone app. Where it makes sense, we build WhatsApp-based flows (like appointment reminders or order confirmations) alongside the main app rather than assuming everyone will download something new.

Test on the device people actually own

A mid-range Android phone from three years ago, not the latest flagship, is the right baseline device for usability testing in most of the markets we build for.

These aren't constraints to work around — they're the actual design brief for building software that works for the majority of users on the continent, not just the minority with premium devices and fibre connections.