GROOMING THE FUTURE OF AFRICA'S VIBRANT WORKFORCE

EARLY EXPERIENCE

The experience is nothing short of amazing!

The Side Hustle internship is a platform that is designed to help people develop employability skills as well as improve their small-scale digital endeavors.
The Side Hustle internship was created in such a way that it gives accepted interns the opportunity to choose a course of interest. This has helped me choose a course on user interface and user experience design (UI/UX), as I have a passion for creativity and design.

This is the Cohort 4.0 and it's filled with mentors/tutors who are experts in their field. For my course, we were given two excellent mentors who were willing and patient enough to put every member through the topics as regards UI/UX. Weekly class schedules are posted on the Microsoft Teams and Telegram messaging platforms, allowing interns to plan their time to attend every weekly class. There is also an interactive session with mentors which gives room for questions and answers that have enabled us to understand the course better.

A weekly test/task is also administered and serves as a prerequisite for interns to move to the following week. The test serves as a reminder of all we have done throughout the week. Side Hustle's internship tasks enable interns to practice all that they have been taught. Practice, they say, leads to perfection. We have been shared into groups to carry out tasks more adequately.

One challenge the internship has faced has been poor network connection issues, which made it quite stressful to go through each lesson. Although these challenges have been faced head on and solutions brought forward, as class recordings from each class as well as pre class videos are made available on the interns' dashboard right there on Side Hustle's website, several other methods have been employed and have helped tremendously.

PRODUCTS, USERS AND DESIGN

Product Design (UI/UX) is the process of developing a usable product that meets customers' needs by defining the users' problems and finding creative solutions to these problems.

Taking us on this journey is the quintessential and vibrant Product and Community Designer, Jeremiah Folorunso. He exposed us to the following striking points:

The term UI/UX is used to refer to the result of this process, the design qualities of an existing product. A Product designer is someone who uses the different facets and tools of design to create and execute a solution that solves a user's experience deficiencies.

UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience) are two interdependent terms. While UI generally deals with the interaction between users and computer systems, software, and applications, UX deals more generally with a user's overall experience with a brand, product, or service.

The User Interface (UI) is a more technical approach that looks at optimizing the interaction between people and computer systems. It relies on anticipating the needs of users and building specific inputs to get a user where they need and want to go. UI is all about designing interfaces to contribute to a better overall user experience through the use of icons, buttons, visual elements, color, responsive design and information architecture. A UI designer tries to make the interaction with a digital device as intuitive as possible.

User Experience (UX) deals with the overall experience users have when interacting with a product. Products designed with user experience in mind are easy to use and provide a positive experience. In this sense, UX has to do with the emotional experience a user has with a product. It does not just relate to the practical usage of a system but to a user's overall experience with a brand from start to finish. To design a positive User Experience, it is important to understand your user and their needs, goals and struggles by using the following UX process; empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

Therefore, product design is the process designers use to blend users' needs with business goals to help brands make consistently successful products.

SUPERB MENTORSHIP

We were introduced to the concept of product design (what it entails) and design. Mr. Abiodun took us through UI/UX and differentiated what each entity meant. He explained that UX can be described as a discipline that concerns itself with what users feel about a product after carrying out thorough research on the products and how they make users' lives easier. He also used real-life examples to pass his message across.

We also learnt that one of the qualities of a product designer is to be empathetic. UI, on the other hand, deals with the aesthetic and layout of a digital product. Stages of design were also learnt, and he further explained that the stages do not have to follow a linear path.

Lastly, Abiodun shared an article with us to broaden our knowledge in regards to UI/UX, and we also learnt about the laws of ux. We also moved further to design thinking. The following were explained:

• Design thinking.
• Why is design thinking important?
• Principles of design thinking,
• Stages of design thinking.

As interns for UI/UX design, we have been privileged to have Jeremiah Folorunso as a mentor during these few weeks of side hustle internship. Most of us interns had barely any knowledge about UI/UX design, but the brief introduction by Jeremiah encouraged most of us as to how interesting the course would be. He gave us an insight into the difference between UI/UX design and the job opportunities involved. We learnt that UI Design is concerned with the aesthetics of a product and how it is laid out, while UX Design is concerned with the study of user behavior and understanding of user motivations, to design a better digital experience and the overall feel of a product. He also taught us that these two fields go hand in hand and are often put together in the world of technology today. Concluding, we were introduced to information architecture as the science of organizing and structuring content of a website, web or mobile application, and social media software with the aim of allowing users to easily adjust to the functionality of a product without much effort. UI/UX is a human-first approach to design.

We, (specifically members of PURPLE GROUP 16 UI/UX) would like to say a big THANK YOU to the Side Hustle Team for putting this internship together. For their invested time and effort, we cannot be grateful enough. 
Although this internship still has a few weeks to go, the overall experience in Side Hustle Cohort 4.0 (2021) has been a good one so far.