One of the great legacies of the COVID-19 pandemic in Kenya and many other emerging markets globally is that digital transformation happened at scale within an incredibly short timeframe. Personally, as someone who has been a digital marketing and technology entrepreneurship practitioner for close to three decades, the pandemic essentially brought to life ideas and business concepts that were seen for the most part as being ‘nice to have’ as opposed to being ‘essential’ to the very survival of businesses of all sizes enabled via technology. 

One thing we noticed going back to the earliest days of the pandemic is that many consumer facing businesses did not have adequate or even functional digital channels to maintain some level of semblance of normality once stay-at-home and ‘social distancing’ protocols went into full effect. You could no longer simply walk into a supermarket or access a restaurant in a manner that was considered normal. As a result, and in a rather short period of time, many businesses ‘pivoted’ to offering e-commerce enabled channels — either through proprietary direct-to-consumer platforms, also known as ‘DTC’, or via third-parties such as food delivery platforms for instance. 

Therefore, what comes to mind from this pandemic period is that it was not really a matter of building or having the most refined or customer-centric user experience or ‘UX’ for e-commerce capable channels but rather it was about having something that ‘worked’ first and then figuring out how to enhance it over time. However, based on some recent personal experiences during the festive season, it’s genuinely surprising to me that many well known and trusted Kenyan brands have incredibly bad UX for their DTC e-commerce platforms! Let me explain why. 

In my opinion, if you want to get a sense of a great e-commerce UX, you have to consider websites and apps such as those from Carrefour and UberEATS as benchmarks from my perspective. Many of these have been designed to be remarkably intuitive and user-friendly whilst taking into consideration local nuances such as Kenya’s love affair with M-Pesa as a preferred mode of payment, as well as being able to describe your delivery address using narratives like, ‘…come to the third left turn on the rough road and look for the big tree on your left before the bright green gate with a security sign for…’. I think you get what I mean 🙂

Having used three Kenyan e-commerce platforms this week, I was astonished that in each instance I had to make phone calls at some point in the process to ensure what I was ordering and/or paying for would actually get ordered, paid, and delivered, as expected. In my mind, when I use an e-commerce platform, this should never be the case as the entire process should happen ‘end-to-end’ online with practically no friction. However, in the local context, even if the e-commerce services ‘work’ practically, their UX could really use a complete overhaul to make them so much better for the end user. 

Through my own work and experiences from building and managing websites for close to three decades, one of the things that I know really matters when it comes to UX is that its never enough to be visually appealling – it is even more important to be user-friendly! In UX parlance, we often use the phrase ‘don’t make me think!’, or ‘get the user to where they need to go, in one or two clicks’. The reality is that when millions of consumers in Kenya have already become accustomed to extremely well thought out and highly intuitive UX from some of the world’s biggest e-commerce brands, they can immediately ‘sense’ when they encounter bad UX that does ‘not work’ in the manner it should. 

Going forward, my opinion is that is that as brands in Kenya increasingly channel their efforts to capture more and more consumer spend via digital channels such as websites, mobile apps, social media, and everything else in between, UX is the next frontier that can either elevate or compromise business performance, and by extension the very brand itself. This is especially true for Millennial, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha consumers who are ‘digital natives’ with a highly elevated fluency in all things digital, meaning UX is everything for them when interacting with brands of all sizes and in all contexts from an e-commerce perspective.