Two weeks in Sabon Gari: what 60 shopkeepers told us about software

We spent fourteen days in Sabon Gari market and the streets around it, sitting behind counters rather than asking people to come to us. Sixty shopkeepers gave us their time. We went hoping to hear which features they wanted. We heard almost nothing about features.

Trust came before anything we could build

The first question was never “what does it do”. It was “who else can see this”. Several owners had been asked for their records by people with no business seeing them, and a phone that holds the true state of a shop is a liability if the wrong person opens it.

One woman put it plainly: her book stays under the counter because a book cannot be read from anywhere else. That is a real advantage of paper, and any app that ignores it is arguing with the customer.

Time is measured in customers waiting

We had been thinking about entry time in seconds. Shopkeepers think about it in people. A step that takes twenty seconds is not slow at midnight and is impossible at four in the afternoon with three customers at the counter and a fourth deciding whether to wait.

That is why the nine who had abandoned an app did so. Not one said it was hard to understand. Every one of them said there was no time for it during the day, and by night they could not remember the day well enough to catch up.

Language is not translation

Everyone we met could work in English. It still was not the language they counted in. People switched to Hausa the moment the numbers got serious, and back to English for our benefit — which told us the English version was politeness, not preference.

The words that mattered were not menu labels but the shop’s own vocabulary: what a carton is, what a pack is, what “credit” means when the person owing is family.

What we changed when we got back

1. 1The daily book became the whole app, not a section of itTwo numbers at night, entered in under two minutes, because that is the only slot that reliably exists.
2. 2Recording each sale became optionalIt was the default before. For most shops it is the thing that made the app impossible during trading hours.
3. 3We stopped asking for anything we did not needEvery field we removed was a question an owner would otherwise have to decide whether to answer honestly.