What is a Nigerian Designer?
The ecosystem’s most misunderstood child
Only recently have we seen a bit of effort being put into the way digital products look aesthetically. Several discussions and heated up arguments have happened over apps, websites and forums built in Nigeria with poor aesthetic look, but have been able to gain a lot of users for example, Lindaikeji, Nairaland, etc. And to summarize the crux of the argument, “Nigerians don’t care about design” which can be translated into “Nigerians don’t care about how it looks”.
In other settings, the argument more or less morphs into a comparison between “User Experience (UX) design Vs User Interface design (UI)”. In this case, most agree that UX > UI, meaning it can look terrible as long as what the user wants is deeply understood and translated into the product. The first thing I am thinking is why are we even comparing between skills that should be one? But the greater harm is that comparison which should not have started in the first place has been exaggerated to a point where it is beginning to hurt not only digital products like the banking portals, and applications, but also young talent who seek to pursue a career in design.
In some way, I believe we have the entire conversation wrong and the argument is upside down because we fundamentally are eluded of the true understanding of design.
First, what is this ‘design’?
In as much as I would like to believe everyone knows this, we have seen and read that most people don’t. According to the Swedish Industrial Design Foundation(SVID), “’Design’ is a process of developing purposeful and innovative solutions that embody functional and aesthetic demands based on the needs of the intended user. Design is applied in the development of goods, services, processes messages and environments”
Now, it’s important to note from the definition that design encapsulates how something looks and how it functions. Design does not just apply to digital products but also spans across physical products for example, chairs, packaging, etc and sometimes to get a good visual designer, ask him/her how something outside an interface could be designed better and listen closely to the answer. But most importantly, and firstly, our conception about what design is, needs a turn around.
Where’s the demand for designers?
Over the last couple of months, we have received more than 300 job postings from people looking to build projects or to hire. We pulled that into a chart to see what the demand for designers is like and we not entirely surprised:
Just a little under 7% of these jobs want talent solely dedicated to design. Usually, the request goes like “I want a front end and UI/UX person”. While it is not an outrageous request because most designers pick up coding skills at some point, they find our recommendation of splitting the roles very weird and the response most times is something like “so the designer will just be designing what?” And that explains the psyche of the average Nigerian client.
Also, the few designers we have are beginning to understand the demands of the market around here and have started to learn how to code in addition to their design skill. I had a chat with several designers few weeks back and one of them said “I’m learning to code because no one around here is ready to pay a good price for your design only skill”. I guess you have to do what you have to do to stay relevant.
Most businesses and start ups don’t value the design process, or even understand how important it is. At Devcenter, we build in sprints so we employ testing out all the ideas and possibilities of what a product could be at the design stage before committing to any code. A lot of clients around here find it new but are grateful at the end of the day. However, we believe this philosophy should be standard across how start ups and businesses build their products.
What’s next?
There’s a huge learning curve for us locally to understand the value of a designer, and we then hope it translates to the way products are developed.
For now, to most people, a Nigerian designer is a visual designer — just make it fine. To the second majority, a Nigerian designer does not exist — because you can not only be a designer, you must write code. The third group? A Nigerian designer is still a farce. In the nearest future, maybe we would come around to consider real design in digital products built in Nigeria.
