Accessibility: 7 Things Every Designer Needs To Know

Good read alert! I recently bumped into this post by Jesse Housler, an Accessibility Specialist at +Salesforce, and I absolutely loved it. Here is a summary of the main points discussed but check out the original post for all the awesome deets.

Source

Accessibility enables people with disabilities to perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to the web.

Tajriba {UX Month: Nairobi 2015}

It was in 2013 when the first Tajriba event was held and that was the first time a UX month was being done in Africa. You can read how that event went down from this blog post by +Mark Kamau who orchestrated this feat.

[Reblogged: Originally posted here]

Tajriba – A Swahili word which means experience.

Partners from all over the world supported this mission and their stories are the most interesting such as +Erik Flowers Principal Service Experience Designer at Intuit who received his invite through a tweet from +Kagonya Awori or +Susan Dray a leader in the UX field who contributed in the founding of ACM’s sigCHI {Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction} chapter and found this new development in Kenya – a must do.

Google UX MasterClass { 2nd Edition }

The first edition of the Google UX MasterClass was a blast and that's why I am so happy to announce that the second edition is here with us! ...and the crowd goes wild...

This April, designers from the Google User Experience Team will be visiting Sub-Saharan Africa to conduct hands-on user experience MasterClasses in Cape Town, Nairobi and Lagos.

Brief Recap: Google UX MasterClass

My friends are starting to think I sound like a broken record because every time I come back from an event and they ask me how it was I always say something like “It was awesome! You really missed out!” Even with that said, I will still not make an exception this time around and I will go ahead and iterate those very words when it comes to describing the Google UX MasterClass event which went down this past weekend because as you guessed it…Yes! It was awesome! If you weren’t there you really missed out!

But I am that person. That guy! So instead of just telling you how awesome it was, I thought it would even be better if I showed you. I didn’t have time to go about taking a bunch of photos as the two day event was fully packed with marvelous activities. However, I hope that the few that I have will go a long way in providing the 1000 words that this post will obviously not have.

UI Tenets +Traps

I've been having a huge debate in my head for the past couple of weeks on how I would best deliver this topic to you guys. This is because it is based on a training that was held at the +iHub UX Lab at the +iHub but I never managed to attend it due to prior commitments. However, I was given a number of flashcards that they used during the training and to be honest, I found them easy to understand once I went through them. 

So the big question was whether I could be able to explain the cards in such a way that everyone else would as well. My biggest fear here is misleading everybody here. I wouldn’t want that. Not at all! With that said, I thought the best way to start this discussion would be to give an introduction of some sort on what UI Tenets + Traps is all about then go ahead to explain the cards one by one in later posts. Cool?

The Notebook

A carpenter is only as good as his tools, or so the saying goes. However, this phrase doesn't apply to the woodworking trade only. The same has also been used for mechanics as “a poor mechanic blames his tools” and this time round, I would like to use it for designers as well. And what this phrase simply means is that if one really cares about their work, then they ought to invest in their tools.

Before going into app development, it is important for designers to get all the necessary tools together to avoid wasting time and money on improper technology. One of the cheapest and most effective tools that one can invest in before thinking of all the available software out there is a quality notebook!

Google User Experience Masterclass

Reposted from the Google Africa Blog.

If you are intrigued by the world of User Experience and Design like I am, then this is definitely the post you should be checking out.

This October, designers from the UX team at Google will be visiting Sub-Saharan Africa to conduct a 2-day, hands-on user experience masterclass in Cape Town, Nairobi and Lagos. Attendees at the masterclass will learn the process of taking an idea from concept to launch, including sketching, user testing, prototyping, and the importance of making continuous improvements to keep your users engaged and satisfied. It will cover interaction and visual design pattern including Material Design. The masterclass will be conducted with in collaboration with Flow Interactive {Cape Town}, the +iHub {Nairobi} and the Pan Atlantic University {Lagos}

Desiderata: The Voice Of Design

I had to learn about Desiderata the hard way. And nope, I am not talking about the 1927 Poem although if you know it you are in a better position to kinda understand what I will be going on about in the next couple of sentences because the poem refers to ‘desired things’.

"Change in the world can be initiated in two ways. We can act because we want to move away from a situation we do not like, or we can act towards an imagined and desired situation. However, when trying to effect these changes, unfortunate situations arise where the common foundation in solving the existing problems is focusing on only that-which-is (description and explanation), verses that-which-ought-to-be (ethics and morality) without much consideration for that-which-is-desired (desiderata).

Be You Dot Com

Hey guys,

I thought I should end this month on an inspirational note. Well…kind of an inspirational note, hehe. This post was actually triggered by a conversation I remember having with an acquaintance of mine some time back.

He mentioned how he had noticed that I apparently do not have enough code stuff on my blog. Actually, “You don’t have any code stuff on your blog yet you are a programmer…” – Were his exact words. So I wasn’t taking him out of context when I iterated that story to a couple of friends of mine later that day. And he went ahead to suggest that I should try and post more content along the programmer/techie lines. Especially code.