Designing for a world that doesn't always work
Most products are built on a quiet assumption that everything underneath them will hold. The payment will clear. The connection will stay up. The price will be the same tomorrow as it was today. The courier will arrive. Designers in stable markets rarely state these assumptions out loud, because they almost never get tested, and a thing you never have to think about starts to feel like a law of nature rather than a convenience someone else is paying to maintain. Then you build in a place where none of it is guaranteed, and you discover very quickly that reliability was always a luxury, and that a product resting on it will fall over the moment the ground moves.
Take something as ordinary as the cost of delivery. In a stable market, you can treat it as a fixed number and build your entire pricing around it without a second thought. In a market where a courier's price can swing sharply from one week to the next, that same assumption quietly breaks the product, because a fee you quoted on Monday can be wrong by Friday, and someone always ends up absorbing the difference. This is exactly why Kwick carries a buffer built into its delivery model. It is not a clever optimization. It is an admission that the number will move, and a decision to design for that movement up front rather than pretend it away and let a real person eat the cost later.
Connectivity and power teach the same lesson in a harsher form. When data is intermittent and electricity is not guaranteed, you cannot design only for the moment when everything is working, because for a meaningful slice of your users, that moment may be the exception rather than the rule. You have to design for the bad moment too. What happens when the connection drops halfway through? What the person sees when the thing they were relying on is simply not available right now. Whether they lose their progress, or their money, or just a little more of their trust in you. Graceful failure, the unglamorous art of breaking softly instead of catastrophically, turns out to matter far more than any feature, because it is the difference between a product that disappoints once and one that betrays.
The real shift is a mental one. In an unreliable environment, resilience cannot be the thing you handle last, the edge case you get to once the happy path is polished. It has to be a first-order concern, sitting right at the center of the design from the very beginning. You start by assuming things will fail, because they will, and then you build so that when they do, the user is not the one punished for it. That single reversal, from designing for the best case and patching the rest, to designing for the worst case and letting everyone else inherit the benefit, changes almost every decision that follows.
And here is the part that surprises people who have only ever built on solid ground. Designing for the hardest conditions does not produce a worse product for everyone else. It produces a better one. A product engineered to survive a dropped connection, a volatile price, and a power cut is a product that feels effortless when none of those things happen, because all the sharp edges have already been sanded down for the people who need it most. It almost never works the other way around. Something built for perfect conditions and then dragged into difficult ones just breaks, over and over, in ways its makers never imagined, because they designed for a world that does not actually exist for a great many of the people they hoped to serve.
So if you are building for anywhere the rails cannot be trusted, the most useful instruction we know is also the simplest. Design for your most constrained user on their worst day. Assume the connection drops, the price moves, the power goes, and the payment stalls, and make sure that when it does, your product holds the person up instead of letting them fall. Get that right, and everyone luckier than them gets a product that feels like magic, without ever knowing why.
solveX is a product studio building digital tools for African and diaspora communities across Nigeria and the UK.