World Usability Day Nairobi

The Google Developers Experts program is excited to celebrate World Usability Day from 30 November to 2 December in Nairobi to help spread awareness about the importance of good design to product creators everywhere. We've invited Googlers and experts from around the world to speak with you about visual design, design sprints, interaction design, front end development, user research and much more. 

In the afternoon, we'll offer limited slots to meet with one of the speakers to review your mobile app or website to get personalized, actionable feedback on how to apply Material Design and improve your overall product layout. 

We hope to see you!

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When and where

Thu Nov 30 09:00:00 2017
iHub, Nairobi

Getting there

Our event will be hosted at iHub 6th Floor, Senteu Plaza, Galana / Lenana Road Junction, Nairobi Kenya

Plan your day

The event will take place on Thursday, November 30 to Friday 1 December, 2017 from 10:00 - 18:00. Before the event, review the agenda below and find your favorite sessions.

On the day of the event, take a break on us! Lunch will be served from 12:30 - 1:30. Networking and light refreshments to follow the last presention.

Agenda | Day 1

10:15 - 10:55 AM | Inclusive Design

Kene Udeze


Google Developer Expert, Product Design (UX/ UI)

In the age of digital, low/limited bandwidth can be considered a disability. The talk will focus on accessibility on the web, why it’s important and how to design for everyone.

Kene is a UX designer with special interest in using empathy as a tool for creating functional and beautiful products. He works as a UX Designer at Booking.com and prior to that lead design at Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB). In 2013 he started Usable; A community of designers, developers and enthusiasts committed to designing beautiful and functional products. Kene is a pretend chef, closet adventurer and a wanderer.  

11:00 - 11:45 PM | Driving innovation through customer collaborations

Tosh Juma

Founder Nairobi Design Institute

 

 

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.

12:00 - 1:05 PM | Guerrilla ACTIVE Testing with your team

Silvia Calvet

UX Design & Strategy

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.

14:00 - 14:30 | UX Inception

Huston Malande


Product Manager, Safaricom Alpha

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.

14:35 - 15:15 | Designing Habit Forming Products

Mark Kamau


Director of User Experience Design, BRCK

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.                                                                                                                                       

15:30 - 17:00 | Designing Money

JR Kanu

Design Coach

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.

Agenda | Day 2

2:00 - 4.00 PM | UX App Reviews & One on One Mentorship

We'll have a limited number of slots to meet with speakers to review your mobile app or website to get personalized, actionable feedback on how to apply Material Design and improve your overall product layout.