Building the Knowledge Infrastructure for African Product Design

African product teams solve some of the world’s most complex design challenges. Building for unreliable internet connections, diverse payment methods, fragmented logistics, cash economies, and millions of first-time digital users. Despite this, there has never been a central place to study how these products solve those challenges through design.

I wanted to change that.

What began as a personal research library has evolved into a broader vision: building the knowledge infrastructure for African product design. My ambition is for Tabs to become a resource that supports designers, educators, students, product managers, researchers, and companies throughout the product development process, from research and discovery to design education and product planning.

Role

Founder, Product Lead, Product Designer

Responsibilities

Product Vision & Strategy, UX & Product Design, PM, Community Building

Deliverables

Responsive Web Experience, Brand Identity, Design System, Project Leadership

Timeline

Q4 2024 -

Team

Dami / Founder, Design Lead

Emmanuel / Frontend

Dennis / Frontend

Daniel / Backend

Damisi / Backend

Tabs is a growing repository of African digital products, organized by UX patterns, user flows, interface elements, and industries. Rather than collecting screenshots for inspiration alone, the platform documents how real products approach onboarding, payments, authentication, navigation, commerce, and other everyday experiences.

Today, the platform serves a growing community of designers and continues to evolve into a richer learning resource with expanded documentation, structured content, and tools that make African product knowledge easier to explore, understand, and apply.

500+ Users, 4+ Ways to Explore, 100+ Documented Screens, Growing Platform

The Problem

Every product I worked on began in almost the same way.

Before sketching ideas or opening Figma, I spent hours searching for references. If I needed to design a wallet funding flow, a checkout experience, or an onboarding journey, I downloaded several apps, created new accounts, navigated through each experience, took screenshots, and organised everything into folders I hoped I would remember later (plot twist, I never did)

Over time, my little collection grew into hundreds of images spread across different folders and projects. Finding a specific pattern often meant repeating the same research because I couldn't remember where I had saved it. More importantly, none of that work benefited anyone else. Every project started from scratch, even though someone had already done the same research before. The more designers I spoke with and teams I joined, the more familiar this workflow became. Everyone had their own collection of screenshots. Some organised them in folders. Others dumped them in Figma files or on their phones.

Clearly, problem wasn't a lack of inspiration, it was lack of shared knowledge and access.

Why It Matters

African product teams are solving complex design challenges every day, but there is no structured place to study how these solutions evolved across industries, products, or user journeys. The absence of a shared reference library affects more than individual designers. It slows down product teams, increases duplicated effort, and makes it harder for students and early-career designers to learn from products built within their own markets.

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Building the Knowledge Infrastructure for African Product Design

Building the Knowledge Infrastructure for African Product Design

The Problem

Why It Matters

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