Oluwatosin Kazeem

SendpackAfrica is a delivery platform designed to solve how businesses and individuals send and receive packages across Africa. The product has three components: a delivery app for customers and business owners, a dashboard for delivery merchants to manage their fleet, and a dispatcher app for riders to accept and carry out deliveries.

I co-founded SendpackAfrica with Ibukun, who handled the product management side. I was responsible for all the research and product design across all three modules.

The product was fully designed and prototyped but never made it to production. We attempted to develop it but ran into issues with developers, including payment disagreements and conflicts with a developer we tried to onboard. While partial development happened, it was never launched. The design work and research are what I am showcasing here.

In Nigeria, when you send a package, you're often told it's on its way. But you have no way to actually verify that. There's no tracking, no estimated delivery time, no transparency at all.

One of the people I interviewed during research was a small business owner who sends packages across the state to customers. Their biggest problem was exactly this: they'd get told their package was moving, but they couldn't track it. Then the delivery would take far longer than promised, which meant the dispatcher lied at the first stage. The business owner had no way to prove anything to their own customers.

In Nigeria, this transparency problem goes beyond inconvenience. When a business can't tell its customers when a delivery will arrive, they get labeled as scammers. Fast. For small businesses trying to build trust, the inability to provide tracking information was directly threatening their reputation and their survival.

I conducted one-on-one interviews with about six to seven people, plus informal conversations over chat with friends who are small business owners. This gave me both structured insights and a broader sense of how widespread the problems were.

The research methods included direct interviews, chat-based conversations, and secondary research examining market trends, delivery costs and times, and features of existing services.

Three core problem areas emerged. Communication: users could not communicate effectively with dispatch riders, which made multiple deliveries nearly impossible because there was no way to explain logistics clearly. Time management: most businesses could not make deliveries without disappointing customers. Late deliveries were the norm, and scheduled deliveries were not even possible with most services. Speed: some dispatch riders were taking on more orders than they could handle, causing delays across all their deliveries.

All three problems pointed back to the same root cause: a lack of transparency throughout the delivery process.

We analyzed three main competitors: GIG Logistics, Lori, and Jumia.

SendpackAfrica was designed to have the most complete feature set. All four platforms offered multiple delivery options, and most had real-time tracking. But SendpackAfrica was the only one that offered shareable tracking links, flexible payment options, and a merchant web application, alongside GIG not offering shareable links or flexible payment, Jumia lacking real-time tracking entirely, and Lori being the closest competitor with most features but still missing the merchant dashboard.

The shareable tracking link was the key differentiator. It directly addressed the core trust problem: a business owner could share a link with their customer so they could see the live location of their package. Transparency was not just a feature. It was the product.

I designed the information architecture for all three modules.

The customer app lets users browse different delivery services, select one, create a delivery request, and share a tracking link with their customers for live location transparency.

The merchant dashboard is for businesses that run their own delivery service. They use it to onboard and manage riders, track every delivery being carried out during the day, and monitor payments for all their riders.

The dispatcher app works like Uber. Riders see available deliveries on a map, accept or decline whichever ones they want, and track their own active deliveries.

The three modules communicate with each other. When a customer creates a delivery, a dispatcher sees it and accepts it, the merchant can track it from their dashboard, and the customer can share the live tracking link.

We chose phone number authentication as the primary sign-up method. In Nigeria, people are more reliable with their phone numbers than email. Most users are more active on their phones and many are not regularly checking email for various reasons.

Phone-based auth also meant the team could reach users immediately after sign-up, and email verification was optional for features like notifications and order history.

Users create a delivery from the homepage by providing pickup location, drop-off location, item type, and preferred delivery time. The app calculates estimated cost based on distance, automatically assigns a nearby delivery merchant, and provides real-time status updates to both sender and recipient.

To handle edge cases, there is a direct calling feature between dispatchers and senders for real-time issue resolution. Users can also add messages to their deliveries before a rider is assigned, which adds context and reduces ambiguity.

For cancellations, there is a time-based policy. After a certain window, you cannot cancel, and if you do cancel within the window, there is a fine to compensate for the inconvenience on either end. This protects both riders and senders.

The original plan included bikes, cars, and trucks. For the MVP, we removed trucks and kept it to bikes and cars. This was a deliberate scope decision to keep things focused and shippable.

I created a shared style guide and component library used across all three modules. This kept everything consistent and connected.

It was the same approach I later used on ClaraWave and CollectAfrica: building shared components across multi-module products to maintain consistency without things feeling broken or disconnected.

I started with hand-drawn sketches to rapidly explore layouts, then moved into low-fidelity wireframes to focus on the most important features and user requirements before getting into detailed design.

We went through a lot of wireframe iterations because we were trying to get a very simple layout. Throughout the wireframing process, I worked closely with Ibukun to make sure the designs met both business and user needs.

SendpackAfrica did not launch, and that was the hardest part. The design and research were solid, but we could not get past the development hurdle. Developer disagreements and payment issues stopped the product from becoming real.

If I were starting this project today, two things would be different. First, I would develop it myself. Since 2021, I have built the design engineering skills to go from design to production-ready code. I would not need to rely on external developers. Second, I would spend more time upfront on research and make sure I have a much clearer path for the MVP before starting any design work.

What I am proud of is the depth of the research and how clearly it identified the trust problem. The shareable tracking link was not just a feature we added. It came directly from understanding that Nigerian businesses were being called scammers because they could not provide delivery transparency. That insight drove the entire product direction.