Figma Africa Nairobi (UX With Zeddy)
Thursday 13th December, on a calm evening … down here in Nairobi, Figma Africa community gathered to learn and discuss designing for innovation. How do you start, how do you validate? In the user-centered world, models employed for this are user research & A|B testing.
On October 4th, we ‘launched’ the Figma Africa community in Nairobi in partnership with the Nairobi Design Community ran by Kirui & Maryann. Why was this done and why should it matter? In this age of innovation outburst especially in Africa, the issue of sustainability automatically arises.
How do we build and solve problems in a way that achieves long-term positive impact? How do we merge the efforts of the innovator, the nature of the problem they’re solving and the people it affects? User-centered design! Hence the need to make design education more accessible and this why we run communities.
What then constitutes the user-centered design process? Majorly 4 things.
- Knowing the business objective
- Understanding end users
- Designing & developing with data
- Measuring results
Zeddy Msagha was our guest speaker/teacher this December, and he did a great job. Zeddy is the senior UX designer at I&M bank and has quite the experience in UX in Banking. He took us through the online onboarding project his team recently did for I&M, with a focus on user research & A|B testing.
Have you ever used a software product that was not easy to use and made your work harder? A very probable reason is that it wasn’t designed using the user research process.
What should we consider when conducting user research? What is it then, that we need to know? Combine both qualitative & quantitative research, majorly so you don’t run into issues from the Value-action gap, which tends to make qualitative data unreliable.
The value — action gap is a well-known psychology principle outlining that people genuinely don’t do what they say they would do and is commonly referred to as what people say vs. what people do. Below is a summary of research methods.
After research & wire-framing we then get to the validating which is the heartbreaker. After all that your users have told you, testing help to prove the actual behaviour, needs & preferences to help you figure if what you’re building/innovating for is useful, usable, desirable and eventually adoptable.
A/B Testing (also known as Split testing) defines a way to compare two versions of an application or a web page that enables you to determine which one performs better. When you run an A/B test, you compare one page against one or more variations that contain one major difference in an element of the control page. After a set amount of time or visits, you compare the results to how the change affected your results.
What can you test for in A|B testing?
The four steps of A|B testing:
- Analyze
- Form a hypothesis
- Interpret result
- Construct experiment
Tools for A|B testing
And with that, we had a clear understanding on where to begin, how it should flow and what to consider when it comes to user research and A|B testing. Here are Zeddy’s slides for anyone craving a deeper understanding.
The Figma Africa community in Nairobi is still intimate and since we’ve seen the need to keep it alive and grow it, we’ll be diving deep in 2019. We have a channel on the Figma Africa Slack Work-space called Nairobi community and use this as our small space to interact, talk design and network as well. This is how to join it.
- First, ensure you’re a member of the Figma Africa workspace; Here’s the join link
- Then search Nairobi Community channel & join. Alternatively, click on this link
In 2019, we’ll have a focus on Learn design programs so as to harness the value in practical work more with the Figma design tool. The event and meetup have done well to introduce, excite and gather the community… in 2019 we dive deeper.
As we close 2018 we’d like to thank all partners, sponsors, hosts, guest speakers and our community immeasurably for making this a reality. For sharing in this thing we care about deeply and actively being a part of the journey.
For 2018 these were:
Figma Africa (Namnso & team)
Nairobi Design Community (Kirui & team)
Metta (Esther & team)
MEST (Fiona & team)
Africa’s Talking (Limo & team)
I’d also like to request firms that are keen on the design process to partner with us to make design education more accessible in one way or another. Let’s come together and get creative about teaching and group projects to innovate for our communities & cities. Let’s champion solving our own problems using proper design processes.
Checking out
“What a user really buys with any solution, is a real-life situation where they feel good. ”
Signing out till January.
To be part of the Figma Community;
Join Figma on SLACK: https://figma-africa.slack.com
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/figma_africa
INSTAGRAM: https://instagram.com/figmaafrica
