Group Buying Marketplace for Nigeria

The problem

Nigerian consumers regularly coordinate informal group purchases to access better prices — through WhatsApp groups, family networks, and community associations. But this process is fragile: money is lost, trust breaks down, and suppliers have no reliable channel to reach group buyers. There was no structured product that formalised this behaviour at scale. The idea started earlier than most people know. In 2023, as part of the Google UX Certificate, I designed a group-buying app concept called Jraf — choosing the space because I kept noticing how frequently people in my network coordinated informal bulk purchases, and how often those arrangements broke down. What began as a capstone became a conviction.

What I did

• —

  Jraf — the origin: in 2023, as a Google UX Certificate capstone, I chose to design a group-buying app. The brief was open; I chose this space because I kept seeing the same thing in my network — people coordinating bulk purchases over WhatsApp and losing money when the arrangements collapsed. Eight discovery interviews confirmed the pattern was widespread and the pain was real.

• —

  Research synthesis: affinity mapped interview findings into four themes — trust failure, money loss, coordination overhead, and supplier invisibility. The core tension: people already had a behaviour (informal group buying) that worked well enough to persist, but badly enough to cause real harm. The design challenge was to formalise the behaviour without making it feel formal.

• —

  Competitive analysis: mapped 9 competitor products across group buying, social commerce, and B2B wholesale. Found that every existing solution either required users to already trust each other (social) or already have purchasing power (B2B). The gap was a product that could build trust between strangers around a shared purchase. That became Jraf's founding design principle.

• —

  Wireframing and iteration: designed the initial onboarding as a 7-step flow — group creation, member invitation, product selection, split calculation, payment, confirmation, and fulfilment. First usability round (5 participants) revealed that users abandoned at step 4. The split calculation screen felt like maths homework. Redesigned: collapsed steps 3–5 into a single screen with automatic split calculation and live price-per-person feedback. Abandonment dropped significantly in round two.

• —

  Usability testing round 2: second round (5 participants) tested the simplified flow on a high-fidelity prototype. New finding: users didn't understand what happened to their money if a group didn't fill. Added an explicit escrow explainer — one screen, plain language, shown once during first-time setup. Trust scores in post-session questionnaires improved markedly.

• —

  Design system: built a full component library for Jraf — colour tokens, type scale, button states, card variants, form components, and a group-progress indicator component that became the signature UI element. The system was designed to support rapid iteration rather than pixel-perfection; every component had documented usage rules and an explicit list of what it wasn't for.

• —

  From capstone to company: the validation from the capstone was strong enough to pursue seriously. Conducted 100+ additional interviews with consumers and tens of supplier conversations before writing production code. The insights from Jraf's usability rounds directly shaped Jiraf's architecture — particularly the group lifecycle model and the escrow-first payment design.

• —

  Jiraf product design: designed the full two-sided product — consumer group buying flows, supplier product listing and inventory management, order management, dispute resolution, and payout dashboard. Built the MVP end-to-end using AI-assisted development, compressing a 6-month engineering timeline into weeks.

Results