Vodafone Safaricom
A classifieds marketplace for Vodafone, close to OLX, built for feature phones across Africa.
- Role
- UI Designer
- Agency
- Oghma
- Client
- Vodafone
- Timeline
- 2013 (3 months)
The short version
Vodafone Safaricom was an e-commerce classifieds site, close to OLX in India, built for users across Africa in 2013. Most of those users had feature phones, not smartphones. I designed the UI screens and flows.
Where it started
The phone people actually had shaped everything. Small screens, basic browsers, none of the flexible layout options a modern smartphone site could lean on.
Designing for the phones people actually had
Instead of designing for an ideal device and scaling down, the constraints of a feature phone set the rules from the start.
01
Design for the screen people actually have
Small screens and basic browsers meant no assumptions carried over from modern, flexible layouts.
02
Keep the marketplace loop simple
Browsing listings, posting one, and contacting a seller had to work cleanly within those same constraints.
Where it stands
This shipped as a classifieds marketplace for Vodafone, across Africa, in 2013. What happened after launch, I never found out, so I'm leaving it at that instead of guessing.
