Designing across borders
March 26 2026
8 min read
When I joined the design team at Paystack and found out I’d be working with the Expansion team across Kenya and Ghana, I was excited. I met Sharon, my manager based in Kenya, and felt some relief; relieved to have someone who knew the products, the markets, and the context I’d be designing for.
I assumed the hardest part would be understanding the new products, flows, and systems.
Turns out, the hardest part was understanding new people.
Designing for users in Kenya and Ghana while living and working from Nigeria sounded pretty straightforward at first. After all, we’re all African markets. Payments are growing everywhere. We deal with similar infrastructure challenges. Our economies even feel like siblings trying to figure things out together.
So I honestly wondered: how different could it really be?
Very different, as it turns out.
Working on payment experiences for people in countries I don’t physically live in has been both humbling and eye-opening. Again and again, I’ve found myself running into assumptions I didn’t even know I had, about how people pay, what feels intuitive, and what a “normal” payment experience should look like.
Slowly, through different tasks, merchant conversations, feedback sessions, and many “oh wow, I didn’t think of that” moments when Sharon walks me through a context, I’ve been learning what it actually means to design for markets that aren’t mine.
This isn’t a guide or a list of lessons. It’s simply a reflection on what it has felt like to design beyond the borders I’m familiar with, and how that experience has reshaped how I think about products, payments, and design itself.
The moment you realize your assumptions don’t travel
Coming from Nigeria, I didn’t consciously think I was carrying assumptions into my work. But I was. Confidently.
Little things like:
“This is how payments work where I’m from.”
“Users will probably expect something similar.”
“This flow worked before, so it should work here.”
“It’s the same fintech, yeah?”
Very reasonable thoughts. Slightly dangerous ones too, as it turns out.
Because payments are deeply local.
In Nigeria, bank transfers power a huge chunk of digital transactions. They’re fast, familiar, and trusted. You send money, you see the alert, everybody moves on with their day.
In Kenya, mobile money isn’t just popular—it’s foundational. M-PESA dominates the market, and for many, it isn’t an option; it is how payments happen.
Ghana has its own flavour of complexity: transfer systems, settlement timelines, and how failed transactions are handled. Different.
The way money moves through businesses and everyday transactions feels different. Not better or worse. Just different.
And these differences matter more than we sometimes realize.
They shape how people choose to pay. What they trust. What feels instant versus painfully slow. What counts as a successful transaction. And what immediately makes someone panic, thinking their money has disappeared.
They also shape what feels intuitive and what feels confusing, even when the interface looks familiar.
Suddenly, flows that felt obvious to me needed rethinking. Words that seemed harmless required more care. Decisions that worked perfectly in one market introduced friction in another.
And I learned something important: design decisions built on assumptions from your personal context or lived experience may create friction for people in other contexts with different experiences.
You start learning payments like you’re cramming for an exam
I’ve spent surprising amounts of time reading about payment systems in countries I’ve never visited, trying to understand:
How mobile money works
Why certain payment methods exist, or why they are the most used
How merchants operate
Why some processes aren’t as instant as we’d like them to be
…And many others, to keep the list short.
Before you know it, you’re designing and confidently sharing your design decisions for Kenyan and Ghanaian products, while still living in Lagos.
Lowkey, it feels like preparing to relocate without buying a flight ticket.
The people closest to the problem know the most
After countless Google deep-dives and ChatGPT conversations about Kenyan and Ghanaian payments, I felt confident. I had this figured out.
Or so I thought—until I started working on a solution for users in Kenya.
My first task came from feedback a merchant shared during a merchant interview. We conduct these interviews to hear from merchants who use our products and understand the issues they're facing, so we can build better products and improve existing ones.
This merchant mentioned that their customers were getting confused about M-PESA and M-PESA Till at checkout and wanted us to remove M-PESA till from ther checkout.
Well, I set to work. I did a bit of research and had it figured out. When I ran into our design lead Kachi here at the Nigerian office, I shared my thoughts with him, and he showed me how to vibe-code a simple prototype of how it would work. My solution involved combining M-PESA and M-PESA Till and automatically detecting which number was inputted based on the number of digits. Everything looked good on screen. I was happy. I proudly shared it with Sharon.
Then she scheduled a call to share her feedback, and everything I thought I understood shifted.
She walked me through the Kenyan mental model, the merchant's perspective, and why my solution wouldn't resonate.
She explained how the average Kenyan thinks of "M-PESA Till."
When they go into a store, they see a till number displayed and pay into it using the M-PESA app (Note: M-PESA Till is a product for business owners; like a business account). So, when they click on M-PESA Till in our checkout, they expect to see a till number displayed. They don't realize that the solution we're offering on the Paystack checkout is like a B2B flow, where they need to input their own M-PESA Till number, and then Paystack deducts the money from their M-PESA Till to pay the merchant they're buying from. That's what's confusing for users. They weren’t expecting to enter a “Till Number” when they chose the option.
At first, I felt a little embarrassed. I realized I hadn't properly sought to understand the problem before rushing to create a solution. But mostly, I was grateful. I had someone guiding me through a context I didn't have, steering us toward a solution that actually worked for users.
That moment taught me: you can read all the Google articles in the world, but if you don't talk to the people closest to the problem and deeply understand their context before proposing solutions, your design will likely miss the mark.
Designing across borders changes you
The biggest shift for me hasn’t just been learning about payments in other countries. It’s learning to design with more humility.
To ask more questions.
To validate assumptions.
To listen more carefully.
To properly understand context before proposing solutions.
Because good design isn’t just about beautiful screens.
It’s about building experiences that make sense in the realities people live in.
And those realities differ more than we often think.
Still learning
I’m still figuring things out.
Still learning how different markets work.
Still asking questions.
Still getting things wrong sometimes, and learning from them.
But designing for users outside my home market has been a stretching and rewarding experience for me so far.
Turns out, designing beyond borders doesn’t just change the product.
It changes the designer who dares to cross them too.
