Andela UX Design Workshop — Invisionapp for collaboration.
In May 2018, I got a chance to facilitate a UX workshop at a remarkable movement in Africa called Andela; A technology company that helps companies build high-performing, distributed engineering teams with Africa’s most talented software developers. The workshop was held under the #AndelaWorkshop platform which seeks to open up Andela doors to the public tech ecosystem to learn, share and showcase the technical expertise in the region.
For this particular workshop, my co-facilitator, @tistopher, and I focused on “Designing for Accessibility and a Deep Dive into Andela’s UX Process”, which helps us determine how we build internal products that solves for our user needs.
PS: Look out for a piece from Topher on Designing for Accessibility
Most attendees were practising developers and designers in both Andela and the public tech ecosystem, a lively, interactive audience to whom we demonstrated the tools we use here at Andela (Sketch, Craft, InVisionapp, Trello, fullstory.) These are design and UX Research-Oriented tools.
The goal of this workshop was to expound avenues through which designers work with developers using these tools with an aim of reducing the back and forth between them on projects, hence avoid disparities and delays in the designs.
Sketch has a tool called craft that links it with Invisionapp that spontaneously syncs the design art-boards with the prototypes in Invisionapp, where we use it for both feedback and collaboration. Developers then go there to find all the raw files and css values to all the UI elements.
The participants got their hands dirty on a team project where we gave them a user persona (A user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer) to solve for her pain-points using Andela’s UX process.
5 groups of 10 people each collaborated on this task and the outcomes were stupendous. They came up with sketches that represents how they solved for the user needs, and each team had time to present these outcomes. Teams that solved for the user needs better walked away with colorful souvenirs from Andela!
To go through the session remotely, and/or in a distributed team with your buddies in the tech ecosystem, feel free to walk through the presentation from my session here. Happy to hear your thoughts, feedback, and outcome of the group work!
I hope the attendees walked away with valuable expertise that can make the designer/developer relationship much smoother :-).
Want to know more about upcoming similar workshops? Follow us on Twitter for updates!
Thanks to Mercy Orangi and Christopher Kanyuga for being awesome collaborators in making this a success!.
