First, there came the tweets that appeared to be no more than benign geekery.
Jumia uses Zenith Bank GlobalPay
— Mark Essien (@markessien) November 21, 2013
Global Pay redirects at some point to Mastercard Austrialia site
— Mark Essien (@markessien) November 21, 2013
All too suddenly, the tweets are revealed to be a UX kvetch that indicts some of the critical points in a typical Nigerian ecommerce value chain.
And now Mastercard wants me to enroll in SecureCode. Don’t have internet banking token on me. Transaction aborted. No purchase today.
— Mark Essien (@markessien) November 21, 2013
If you add something to the cart on konga, then increase the number of items (in cart) and “continue shopping” item count does not get saved
— Mark Essien (@markessien) November 21, 2013
Tried same order on Konga. I saw the interswitch URL say “maximum amount exceeded”, but payment error msg was “An error occurred…”
— Mark Essien (@markessien) November 21, 2013
That’s enough failed online shopping for today. I know a guy in Computer Village that will bring me the inverters and install too.
— Mark Essien (@markessien) November 21, 2013
Konga actually emptied my shopping cart after that failed order. I surely will not go back and fill it again.
— Mark Essien (@markessien) November 21, 2013
This probably happens a whole lot. Personally, the MasterCard Secure Code thing has denied a couple of online merchants my custom. But not everyone has the time or can be bothered to draw attention to these things on Twitter.
Someone should hire me to just come and test their products for 10 hours straight. I will give the devs 10 weeks of work.
— Mark Essien (@markessien) November 21, 2013
Actually, like I tweeted a couple weeks ago, I’m thinking we just pick some local apps/services at random and all go at them with a fine-toothed ui/ux comb. We should do this regularly. It might hurt maker of such app/product a bit, but the gains in actionable feedback and exposure would significantly outweigh the pain.
We know this to be true because honest feedback worked for Taxi Park, now Tranzit. There are many interesting products being put out by our people, but not enough of our people put enough thought into the design and experience to remove friction, create gentler learning curves, and make them truly compelling.
Top Up Genie for instance, is a great product that could benefit from better user experience design, and because I use it a lot, I’m always on their case. As it turns out, they are also maniacal about feedback and always receive my critiques graciously. Not everyone is that self aware and receptive, however.
For the past few months, I have been conspiring with Clive, another UX nut to critique some of Nigeria’s most popular apps/websites, starting from GTBank’s internet banking. For now, time is the devil, but when we eventually get round to it, watch out.
