YUX Design Academy reinvents its contents

The YUX Design Academy is a professional training center whose ambition is to train the future generation of African UX designers. Our main objectives are to provide professional training offered by UX design experts and work on concrete  African products and services cases. But most importantly create a community.

A UI cohort was completed last February and as part of our desire to expand our presence in Africa, particularly in anglophone countries, we decided to plan a masterclass in Ghana. Unfortunately our ambitions were suspended when a global pandemic slowed down activities worldwide.
 

Rework our training sessions

This uncertain time led us to a long period of questioning about the future of the academy. We needed to re/define the objectives and direction of our professional training center for the coming months. This process led us to initiate a transition for the Academy which needed to be more digital. This transition required a lot of effort from the entire YUX team to reinvent and rethink the training sessions, created so far for a non-remote format.
 

The Online Academy

While we were developing a new strategy the academy went under the radar for two months. To adapt our content to the African context we leaned toward offering free content in both English and French, what was left now was finding the right format. What would be the best type of content for our students and what type of content can we create and provide from home ? From this chain of thoughts we realised that the appropriate thing to do for us was to open a youtube channel and share tutorial videos and develop a series of live videos on changing  subjects from one week to another..

The Online Academy was officially launched on Wednesday, May 13, 2020 during the first YUX Academy Live . Daniel Locko and Yann Le Beux, co-founders of YUX were present, as well as Aissatou Dione and Djibril Ndiaye who introduced us to their professions. This first live was the beginning of a series of workshops that we decided to implement, followed by a series of studies on women's finance in Senegal, Web Design in 2020, the Product Manager job etc. Keeping in mind our desire to  share easily accessible content, we decided to publish the recordings of our lives on our Youtube channel. Which inspired us to reflect on launching paid online training courses through an adapted e-learning platform and specialised content.

Launched our first UX Research class online in novembre 2020

After months of preparation, we closed a 2-weeks online cohort on UX research with students from Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda and other african countries.. Our main speakers Samira Matan, Sean Duffy, Dela Andy Kumahor, Kipkorir Kirui, Lade Tawak shared their exceptional experiences and practices through case studies.

What we learned:

• Teaching UX Research online is possible IF you allocate enough time for students to work on their projects deliverables between classes (we had a 2 hours briefing / case study per day, and then homework).

• External speakers, notably with very different experiences and backgrounds add a lot of value to the class while helping students project themselves as UX researchers.

• An online platform is useful to share the program outline, the various classes recordings for those who couldn’t join the live sessions, and class documents.

• Working in pairs worked well for some but not for others (depending on students time management abilities).

• Many students followed the classes on their smartphones - not on their laptop - making it sometimes difficult to use collaborative tools like Miro or Notion.

• Mixing qualitative and quantitative research practices is important (we used our market research service LOOKA for that purpose).

Next Steps: our online UX research content will soon be opened to all

- Stay connected!
 

Our current perspectives

Beyond our tutorials. This reinvention of our course formats has allowed us to reach a broader target in addition to providing an introduction to design. Through our online interventions, we wish to inspire and encourage vocations, to make known and promote the professions of UX-UI Design and UX Research. Above all, and if possible, convince and initiate people to get trained in these future professions.

To know more about it

Stay connected on our networks: YUX Design Academy

Find here some links that will allow you to discover our online content on our Youtube page;
The job of UX-UI Designer - vidéo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czjKeKshuiw&t=1s

Discovery of UX-UI Designer and UX Researcher jobs - live recording
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW6LBZXJXYQ

Case study on women's finance in Senegal - live recording
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW6LBZXJXYQ

Web Design in 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW6LBZXJXYQ