Kofi Market needed a comprehensive platform redesign to support 2,400 artisans across 12 African countries selling handmade goods to buyers in 45+ countries. The existing platform had a 73% cart abandonment rate and artisan onboarding took an average of 4 hours.
What needed solving.
Two radically different users — artisans in rural Ghana with intermittent connectivity and feature phones, alongside premium buyers in London and New York expecting a Farfetch-level shopping experience. Designing for both simultaneously required genuinely different interaction paradigms within a single, coherent system.
The thinking behind the work.
We ran parallel user research: 3 weeks embedded with artisan communities in Kumasi, Kano, and Mombasa; 2 weeks of buyer interviews in London and NYC. Mapped the full commerce flow and identified 14 critical drop-off points. Introduced a dual-interface model: artisan-facing progressive web app optimised for low bandwidth, buyer-facing premium web experience built around storytelling and cultural context.
What we built.
A two-sided marketplace: offline-capable artisan dashboard, bandwidth-adaptive image loading, AI-powered product tagging in 8 languages, storytelling-first product pages that communicate craft and cultural provenance, and a curation engine grouping products by tradition and technique. The design system covers both surfaces with shared tokens.
The impact.
a 42-point improvement
Commerce Category
- Delasie
- Maxwell Attoh
- Nana Yaw Boahene