This web form is preventing online shopping from taking off in many African markets — Quartz

There are many ways we exclude people from using our sites: poor performance, poor accessibility and, as David Okwii points out, not considering other contexts when designing things as basic as a form:

Look at that form. It has fields like street address, state/province/region, apartment, zip code? What is that? I can only tell you that I live in Kanyanya, a Kampala suburb. If you need my exact home, then I’ll either have to send you a GPS location via apps like Whatsapp, Telegram, or Google Maps, or engage you in a long phone conversation in which I’ll try to describe landmarks, building and trees leading to my house. But street address, zip code? Hell no.

I can’t tell you how many times I have reached this step in shopping process and just froze. Several of my friends have had the same experience and yet this terrible form continues to be used by several upcoming online stores such as Rocket Internet’s Jumia. In the end, users just resign and simply buy stuff from the old-school brick-and-mortar stores.