Koyo - Making Nigerian Languages Easier to Learn.
- Client
- Koyo
- Year
- 2026
Available On
Built With
Overview
Helping people reconnect with Nigerian languages, one lesson at a time
Millions of Nigerians, at home and abroad, understand a little of their family's language but never learned to speak it with confidence. Koyo set out to change that with a mobile app that turns Nigerian languages into short, friendly lessons people can pick up in a few minutes a day. I worked on Koyo as part of a product team, overseeing the mobile side of things: shaping how the app was built, guiding the mobile engineers, and making sure what we shipped felt dependable in the hands of real learners.
Challenge
A good idea held back by an app that did not always show up for its learners
As more people joined, the cracks started to show. Lessons sometimes failed to load, progress did not always appear where learners left it, and screens could stall on a slow connection, which is a common reality for many of our users. The design had also grown piece by piece and no longer felt like one product. For a learning app, this is serious. Learning a language depends on habit, and every broken moment gives someone a reason to stop coming back. Our store reviews made it clear that reliability, not new features, was what we needed to fix first.
Solution
Rebuilding the experience from the ground up and making it dependable
We tackled the problem on two fronts. First, the team rebuilt the entire interface, giving Koyo a cleaner, more consistent look that made lessons easier to follow and more enjoyable to come back to. Second, and the work I am proudest of, I led a complete rethink of how the app fetches and keeps track of information behind the scenes. Rather than having every screen ask for its content separately and hope for the best, the app now handles this in one organised, predictable way: it remembers what it has already loaded, retries quietly when a connection drops, and keeps learners' progress in sync. The result was a 97% drop in errors, a noticeably smoother experience, and a higher rating on the app stores as learners felt the difference.
