January 2024 Meetup Blog

By Community Coordinators

Hacks/Hackers Africa hosts monthly upskilling events for the African community and YOU are always invited.

To commence the year 2024, Hacks/Hackers West Africa hosted a peer-to-peer learning session with Morris Kitana on Introduction to Transformative UX design, and Hacks/Hackers East Africa invited Oluwafunmito Odefemi for a masterclass on Survey programming using Open Source Tools.

Read on to find out how these events unfolded…

West Africa: Introduction to Transformative UX design

In his opening speech, Morris Kitana explained the role of a UX Designer as one that goes beyond creating experiences, to customising or ‘shaping’ user experience with the aim of building trust in the process. This was communicated to the 16 participants who attended the virtual session.

‘As journalists and communicators our task is to figure out how the users feel when they interact with our product’, he said. Furthermore, he stated that it’s the communicators role to understand, define and effectively communicate the product. He then advised communicators to understand the intersection of data and user experience.

A few noteworthy discussions; when a communicator has done thorough background work, has engaged, and interacted with their customer, it improves the designing of the product and ultimately the user experience. The impact of these small considerations becomes evident in the growth of the business.

Designing a customised product

There are a few things to consider when designing a customised product, they include:

Ethical Design: In creating customised experiences ethical design needs to be prioritised to ensure the use of seamless tools that the user understands.

User Data Privacy: In customised experiences user data privacy needs to be prioritised as this shapes secure and trustworthy interactions. Kitana explained how this is one way to build trust with the user. He shared examples comparing the ecommerce and health sector. He stated that in the ecommerce space, personalised product recommendations on their platforms are based on user preferences without compromising user data. While in the health and fitness sector, ethical design must always ensure that while collecting data for personal insights, the app prioritises user consent. As a step further, the app needs to provide transparent privacy policies and encryption methods to safeguard user sensitive health information.

UX Design encompasses the entire user journey, understanding their needs, behaviour and aspirations. By doing this, an organisation places itself to lead in a dynamic and competitive online landscape.

The link between UX Design and Digital Transformation

Kitana gave in depth insights about UX principles and how they contribute significantly to the success of digital transformation initiatives, by ensuring that technological innovations are not only cutting edge but also resonate with the users. He stated an example featuring Netflix’s customer growth strategy, where the company had released one season of a popular series for free, once the season ended customers had to subscribe to watch the other seasons. This strategy, he said, resulted in an increase in user subscription.

‘When you know what your user needs, you can customise the experience for them’, said Kitana. By creating intuitive applications, you increase the subscriber base by understanding customer psychology, he added.

In closing, he shared a number of open source tools that can be used in UX Design. These include:

1. Python-which is used for script analysis,
2. Jamovi -Which is used with free stats, and
3. Adobe Creative Suite- used for graphics, coding and visualisation.

The key takeaways from Kitana’s session were:

1. UX Designs should be ethical and have a strong consideration for data privacy.
2. UX designers or organisations need to lead with the customers feedback or preferences to create seamless, customised experiences.
3. A satisfied customer will most likely be loyal to your product and loyalty translates to customer retention and business growth.

Join Hacks/Hackers today!

East Africa: Survey Programming using Open Source Tools

Six journalists from East Africa joined Oluwafunmito Odefemi on 26 January 2024, for an engaging practical session on survey programming using the KoboToolBox open-source tool. This gave them a glimpse into the world of research within the hour.

Odefemi began his session by taking the audience through the advantages of understanding the KoboToolBox for journalists, these included:

1. Data visualisation in storytelling, the KoboToolBox can assist in collecting data, managing data and visualising it in charts, maps and dashboards

2. It assists with field reporting and surveys, helping the journalist gather data directly from the field

3. It assists the journalist to conduct and structure interviews to collect structured data from respondents

4. Fact checking and verification, assists in designing forms to collect and verify information

5. Election monitoring, monitoring polling stations, track voter turn-out, and gather election related data

After the introduction to the topic, Odefemi proceeded to the practical training session where the audience had to create accounts on the KoboToolBox, to allow them to follow step-by-step on how to use the KoboToolBox.

Step 1- Create an account using https://kf.kobotoolbox.org/accounts/signup/

Here the audience was able to experience the simplicity of the tool which allows you to create an account in seconds.

Step 2- Login to your account

This will give you access to a blank canvas that you can use to create your form.

Step 3- Create a new project

Here the audience could see the simplicity involved in creating a form. Inputting their own sections and customising it to their needs.

Step 4- Add a question to your project

Step 5-Implement ski logic

Step 6-Implement validation on logic

Step 7- Deploy the form for offline and online use

Step 8- View submissions and download data

For step 4–8 Odefemi created a questionnaire that could be completed in 10 minutes, and shared with the audience to navigate. He gave instructions on how the form could be completed online or offline. Furthermore, he shared how the form can be embedded in a website, customised for review or feedback.

Odefemi shared the feature ‘skip logic’ which allows a customised question to appear for some respondents and not for others based on a particular response. The participants were intrigued by this feature. He continued to explain skip logic, saying that as the researcher you add a condition in the backend to ensure that the question only appears for certain responses.

Other interesting features of the KoboToolBox included:

1. Data Tracking: It’s ability to track the data that is coming in, the app then generates reports on the raw data collected

2. Image Uploading: Its ability to upload images through the gallery tab, to be used in your survey

3. Visual Display: Its ability to visually display using a map, where the data is coming from

4. Selective Data Export: Its ability to export selective data, one does not have to export an entire spreadsheet. One can choose the sections they are interested in and export

According to Odefemi, the KoboToolBox allows more flexibility than most survey applications. It simplifies your experience, by allowing for upload to a spreadsheet or file, then it (KoboToolBox) automatically filters sections. Unlike other survey platforms which require you to manually input information or sections.

Furthermore, the KoboToolBox offers cascading features that break down information automatically without being manually inputted e.g ‘with a cascading option you can put a question asking respondents where they live, if they say Nigeria — the survey will narrow it down to states in Nigeria then town etc’, he said.

The audience gained practical knowledge of the application of the KoboToolBox as professionals. The next session in this series will be happening in February where Odefemi will delve deeper into how data can be automatically fed into a reporting tool. This will include a real time data uploading session where the participants get to see how their data upload into the reporting tool.

Until next time…

Opportunities

Cooperative AI Research Grants

The Cooperative AI Foundation is seeking proposals for research projects in Cooperative AI.

Anyone is eligible to apply, and we welcome applications from disciplines outside of computer science.

This call will remain continuously open throughout 2024, and will have four deadlines after which applications will be processed: January 14, March 17, July 28, and October 13.

For more information: https://www.cooperativeai.com/grants/cooperative-ai

Deadline: Revolving

Events

Paradigm Initiative (PIN) will host the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum in Accra, Ghana

For more information: https://drif.paradigmhq.org/about-drif/

Dates: April 23–25, 2024

Resources

Subscribe to the ADDO newsletter for interesting and relevant journalism and tech coverage.

Are you interested in how scientists, technologists and journalists can use technology to communicate effectively? Then you are just the Hacks/Hacker we are looking for! Join over 1000 Hacks/Hackers Africa members to get access to ongoing mentorship, global visibility, and professional development.

You can also link up with us on Twitter and Facebook, to stay up-to-date on our exciting chapter activities.