For a long time, we have treated the web as if it were culturally neutral.
A navigation menu is a navigation menu.
A button is a button.
A homepage is a homepage.
A checkout is a checkout.
But interfaces are designed for people, and people are not culturally neutral.
We bring our language, memories, habits, beliefs, environments, social relationships, visual references and ways of communicating into every digital interaction.
So perhaps the more interesting question is not:
“How do we make a website look African?”
It is:
“How can the way people experience Africa influence the way we design digital experiences?”
That is a very different question.
Culture is more than aesthetics
When people talk about African design, the conversation often goes immediately to colour, patterns, photography, textiles, masks, motifs or traditional symbols.
Those things can be beautiful and meaningful.
But culture goes much deeper.
Culture influences how we communicate, how we build trust, how we tell stories, how we navigate social relationships, how authority is understood, how communities gather and how knowledge is shared.
These are not merely visual characteristics.
They are interaction characteristics.
And that means culture can influence UX.
Language is an interface
Language does not simply communicate information. It carries personality, hierarchy, humour, intimacy and context.
In Africa, this becomes particularly interesting because multilingualism is often part of everyday life. A person may move between an indigenous language, Swahili, English, French or another lingua franca depending on where they are and whom they are speaking to.
That reality can influence digital experiences.
Not every interface needs to be translated into every language.
But designers should ask:
What language does this audience naturally think in?
What tone creates trust?
Where does code-switching occur?
Does the interface sound like a person, or like a machine translating a corporate document?
Even translation itself can become a design problem. Different languages can expand or change the structure of interface content, affecting buttons, navigation, forms and information hierarchy. Localization therefore needs to be considered during design, not simply added after the interface has been completed.
Language is not content sitting inside an interface.
Language is part of the interface.
Architecture can teach us about navigation
Consider African architecture.
A courtyard.
A veranda.
A market.
A coastal Swahili house.
A village gathering space.
A contemporary African public building.
These spaces are not merely structures. They organise movement, encounter and social behaviour.
A courtyard can create a central point around which interaction happens.
A market can create discovery through proximity, movement and conversation.
A veranda can create a threshold between private and public space.
A good digital experience also has thresholds.
It has entrances, pathways, gathering points, destinations and moments of pause.
This creates an interesting design question:
What if we stopped designing navigation only as menus and started thinking about it as spatial experience?
The homepage becomes an entrance.
A category becomes a corridor.
A product becomes an object encountered along the journey.
A story becomes a room you enter.
A call to action becomes an invitation rather than an instruction.
This isn’t about making a website look like a building.
It is about understanding that architecture already contains interaction logic.
Behaviour is perhaps the most important layer
The most powerful cultural design insights may not be visual at all.
They may come from observing how people actually behave.
How do customers ask for help?
How do they make purchasing decisions?
Do they trust an institution immediately, or through recommendation?
Do they prefer a formal process or a conversation?
Do they use websites, WhatsApp, phone calls, social media or a combination of these?
How do people share information with one another?
These behaviours should influence digital journeys.
For example, in markets where messaging platforms are deeply embedded in everyday commerce, a business website that forces every visitor through a long conventional form may be technically functional but behaviourally disconnected.
A better experience might allow the visitor to move naturally from discovery to conversation.
The principle is simple:
Design around how people actually behave, not how we wish they behaved.
Storytelling is an interaction model
Africa has extraordinary traditions of oral storytelling.
Stories are carried through generations.
They are remembered through characters, repetition, rhythm, metaphor and place.
That offers another opportunity for digital design.
Instead of presenting information as disconnected blocks of corporate content, we can think about:
Who is the protagonist?
What is the problem?
What is the journey?
What changes?
Where does the visitor enter the story?
This doesn’t mean every African website needs to become a folklore experience.
It means we can recognise storytelling as a legitimate way of structuring information and creating memory.
A digital experience can inform someone.
Or it can make them remember something.
The difference matters.
But there is a danger: designing “African”
This is where I think we need to be careful.
Africa is not one culture.
There is no single African colour palette.
No universal African typography.
No universal African user.
No universal African interaction pattern.
Kenya is not Ghana.
Mombasa is not Nairobi.
Lagos is not Dakar.
Kigali is not Johannesburg.
Even within one city, different communities can have radically different experiences, expectations and behaviours.
So Cultural Interaction Design cannot mean taking a collection of recognisable African visual motifs and putting them on a website.
That is decoration.
The deeper opportunity is context.
Research into African UX has repeatedly highlighted the importance of linguistic, cultural and social context in creating interfaces that are understandable and relevant to users.
The goal should therefore not be:
“How do I make this interface look African?”
It should be:
“What can I learn from the people, place and culture for which I am designing?”
From cultural decoration to cultural intelligence
This is the distinction that increasingly interests me.
I call it Cultural Interaction Design.
For me, it is an emerging approach to digital experience that investigates how:
Language + Place + Architecture + Behaviour + Storytelling + Material Culture + Social Context
can influence:
Information Architecture + Interaction + Content + Visual Language + Navigation + User Journeys + Digital Identity.
It is not about rejecting established UX principles.
It is about expanding them.
Usability still matters.
Accessibility still matters.
Performance still matters.
Responsive design still matters.
Conversion still matters.
But so does relevance.
A technically excellent interface can still feel foreign.
A beautiful website can still feel disconnected.
A perfectly optimised digital product can still fail to understand the person using it.
Designing from Africa, not merely for Africa
There is an important distinction here.
For years, much of digital design in Africa has involved importing established patterns and adapting them to local markets.
There is nothing inherently wrong with learning from global design.
Design has always travelled.
But Africa should not only be a destination where global design systems are deployed.
Our environments, languages, behaviours, histories, creative traditions and ways of organising life can also contribute new ideas to global design thinking.
Recent scholarship has increasingly challenged the assumption that African design knowledge should be treated merely as cultural expression or craft, arguing instead that it can contribute to design philosophy itself.
That is the conversation I want to explore.
Not:
“How can we make African websites look more African?”
But:
“What can the world learn from designing with African contexts?”
This is where my work is heading
This thinking is becoming an important part of the direction I am building through KYTCH.
My background has always sat between different worlds: web development, interaction design, storytelling, SEO, AEO, AI, creative technology and art.
I am increasingly interested in bringing those worlds together.
I want to explore how a business’s identity can become an experience rather than simply a logo and a colour palette.
How a place can influence digital interaction.
How language can influence information architecture.
How behaviour can influence user journeys.
How storytelling can influence navigation.
How AI can make digital experiences more intelligent without making them less human.
And how African cultural knowledge can become a source of design intelligence rather than merely an aesthetic reference.
I don’t claim to have a finished methodology.
I am building it.
And perhaps that is the most exciting part.
Because the web is still young enough for us to ask better questions.
The future of African digital design
I believe the next generation of African digital experiences should not be defined by whether they look “African” enough.
They should be defined by whether they are:
Relevant.
Human.
Contextual.
Intelligent.
Distinctive.
And unmistakably connected to the people they are designed for.
The opportunity is not to create an African version of someone else’s internet.
The opportunity is to contribute our own intelligence to what the internet can become.
That is the direction I am exploring.
And it is becoming one of the foundations of KYTCH:
Turning identity, culture and intelligence into distinctive digital experiences.
