Redesign the USSD Experience for First-Time Users in Low-Literacy Contexts

USSD, the technology behind shortcodes like *737# and *901#, reaches feature phone users across Nigeria without requiring internet access. It is the backbone of mobile banking, airtime purchases, and government service delivery for people who cannot afford or navigate smartphones. Yet most USSD flows are designed by urban engineers for urban users, with menus that assume reading fluency, numerical literacy, and patience for multi-step navigation. For a market trader in Onitsha or a smallholder farmer outside Katsina, a USSD flow that buries a key action five menus deep, or uses financial jargon in English, is effectively broken. Error recovery is usually nonexistent. If you press the wrong number, you start over. This creates real financial risk and erodes trust in digital services. Pick one real USSD service currently active in Nigeria. Document its existing flow by walking through it yourself and mapping every screen. Then conduct at least five structured observations or interviews with users who fit the low-literacy or first-time-user profile. Produce a redesigned flow that reduces cognitive load, shortens paths to key actions, and handles errors gracefully. Annotate your design decisions clearly. Submit your audit of the existing flow, your research notes, the redesigned flow as a screen-by-screen wireframe or annotated diagram, and a short write-up (no more than 600 words) explaining your key choices. Good work will treat USSD as a serious design medium, not a stepping stone to an app. It will show evidence of real user input, not just personal intuition.