A great product is built on powerful user insights. And great insights are found when you walk in your customer’s shoes. Get a hands-on introduction to tested, user research methods, which fuel innovation and help you create highly usable, profitable products. This workshop is ideal for anybody who is involved in the process of building a service or product, right from the CEO to the product team. A great product or service effectively solves a problem or addresses a need/gap. In this interactive session, we will explore a holistic, human centered design approach to discovering these needs/gaps amongst users and gleaning key insights.

Tosh is the founder and creative director of the Nairobi Design Institute, an impact design academy incubated by Dalberg Design based in Nairobi. Tosh is also a creative lead with Dalberg Design and is based in Nairobi. He is a strategist and a problem solver. Tosh works at the intersection of design thinking and experience design in Africa. With over 10 years in the creative industry, Tosh has spent the last few years creating usable and delightful processes and product experiences for bottom of the pyramid audiences in agriculture, education and the finance sector. Prior to Dalberg, Tosh founded the Watungaji Design Studio. A multidisciplinary studio that existed to bring together leading design teams in Nairobi to build platforms that addressed social gaps for startups venturing into the social space in Kenya. As creative director, Tosh led the interaction design teams with the intent of influencing user perceptions and behavior, he worked to capture the critical elements of user experience and helped unite business goals and user needs for optimal user experience. Prior to design consultancy, Tosh worked with the Innovation hub of Nairobi (iHub) as founding Manager. He worked to grow, scale and lead the citywide community of tech innovators. Tosh is passionate about design-education and entrepreneurship. Influenced by the principles of co-design, Tosh puts users at the heart of everything he designs. The combination of his skill-set in design strategy, user research and interaction design has led him to shape products and services that are human based.

Even though you have a good product definition and focus on users, direct input on how real users use the solution is key. It helps you learn if users can complete specific tasks, how long does it takes to complete them, and also qualitative information to understand what users don’t understand or how much satisfied they are with your solution. In this hands on workshop you will learn the basics of usability testing and an active method to allow all your team (Developers, PO and stakeholders) learn from it. At the end of the workshop you will have run a live test and will be able to replicate it back at your office. 

I’m passionate about customer experience, collaboration, business results and sustainable grow. I work with organizations and teams to understand problems, identify needs and constraints to create valuable products and services that meet business goals and customers needs.

Practical ways to ensure that all stakeholders and participants themselves have a good experience doing UX sprints.

Huston Malande facilitates UX design for international companies and helps them create compelling and delightful digital products.

Can you engineer behavior? This talk demonstrates habit-creating design that cut all successful products like Google, Facebook, Instagram and others that result in high adoption, retention and loyalty. It then shows practical ways apply these principles. It is the practical secret sauce. Good design isn't skin deep.

Mark Kamau is a Human Centered Designer with a multidisciplinary design background and experience practicing in Berlin, Amsterdam and across the African continent. He specializes in designing for Africa and emerging Markets. He founded the first open Human Centered Design Lab in Africa, supporting the iHub community of over 16,000 members with a wide array of startups. He also founded the first design week in Africa, Tajriba (which means experience in Swahili) the Nairobi Design week. He is passionate about designing for Africa. He has provided design consultancy through the UX lab for companies around the world. These include Google, Intel, IDEO, Grameen Foundation, MasterCard among others. He has given design workshops across different platforms including TEDGlobal 2017 Mark currently works as the Director of User Experience Design at BRCK. www.brck.com where he leads the research and UX design of ruggedized connectivity hardware and software for Africa. Mark is the Interaction Design Association coordinator for Kenya and has served at the advisory board of Ideo.org, Amplify. He also continues to mentor upcoming designers in several African countries. He believes in the power of Design to transform the world.                                                                                                                                       

What building a savings platform taught us about building for the Nigerian pocket.

JR’s career as a design coach began at Stanford where he led organisations to implement design thinking methodology in their product creation and problem solving strategies. He has worked with Victoria’s Secret, Ireland Davenport, African Leadership Network Ventures as well as the Stanford Africa Business Forum. Prior to Stanford, JR worked with the United Nations across Nigeria, Senegal, Mali and Haiti. He was also a writer at Black Enterprise and Esquire magazines. JR holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Calvin College; a Master of Arts in Journalism from New York University; and an MBA from Stanford University. Before co-founding TDI Lagos, he managed payment innovation at Konga, where he used design thinking to create KongaPay.