CozonLagosHub is a marketplace I am building for Lagos. I have plenty of ideas for it, but I keep coming back to what a buyer actually needs. They want to find something, see whether it fits and reach the seller.
If somebody cannot do those things easily, adding another dashboard feature won't solve their problem. So this is the first journey I want to get right: find an item, narrow the choices, open the listing and contact the seller.
What is there, and what still needs checking
The CozonLagosHub public page has a Lagos choice, a search field, an area selector and categories. Those give a visitor somewhere to start. I still need to check whether the results are useful and whether the contact step works properly, including on a slow connection.
I want to be clear when I talk about the project. Something I plan to build is different from something already on the screen. And something on the screen is different from a journey I have tested with a user. A screenshot can show a feature, but it doesn't show that somebody completed the whole process.
The buyer journey I want to check
My next check is to open the site on a phone, choose an area in Lagos, search for a common item, open a relevant listing and try contacting the seller. I need to write down what happens at each step. Does it load? Are the results clear? Can the buyer understand the seller details and continue?
I also need to try it with a slow network. A page can look good on my laptop while somebody on a phone is waiting for images or wondering whether a button worked. In my post about building digital products for Nigerian users, I talked about these constraints. Now I need to check them in the actual product.
This is a test I intend to run. I am not saying it has passed already. When I have results, I want to share what happened, what needed fixing and whether the fix helped when I tried again. That gives somebody reading the blog something useful to learn from.
I want the first version to stay manageable
Promotions, rewards and more seller tools can sound exciting. But every addition brings more screens, possible errors and support work. I don't want those ideas to distract me from the basic buying journey. I explained more of this in how I cut an overloaded product idea down.
I am still learning and building. CozonDW is where I want to put that work out there honestly, including the parts that need improvement. For CozonLagosHub, the next useful progress is being able to show how a buyer gets from searching to contacting a seller, and where I need to make that process better.