Well I read this article, Setting Up & Preparing For Interviews by Taylor Poindexter the Engineering Manager at Spotify, and the first tip for setting up your interviews really struck a cord as I’ve always struggled with addressing it; How to say no to saying your desired salary by a company when it’s interviewing you.

It got me curious. What are the ‘right’ words to use when saying no and switching the conversation to them giving you a range. As a Community-bred designer I went to my most reliable source of information, people in the slack groups I am in sharing their personal experiences, and shared this question to get different perspective on tackling the issue:

I am happy to say that I am never disappointed by the kindness you sometimes find in these communities. Community members poured in their advice. Hope the responses will help you in future:

Originally published at https://www.lewisngugi.com on December 12, 2021.

Discussing salary while interviewing was originally published in Maverick Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have always known freelancing is all about flexibility. I’ve always wanted to get work done in a timely fashion. Who wants a disorganized life? No one! These are the things I have learnt as a freelancer so far:

1. You learn every aspect of running a business. The business is your boss.
2. Run errands during the day. Like going to check mail from the post office or deposit a cheque.
3. You’re less likely to get sick. That’s if you have a habit of being healthy.
4. Work when and where you feel like it. Except when the deadline is super near.
5. Take weekends off to spend time with family. Which fulfil a level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid.

However, I noticed without structure like the ones you get in a normal organization, the following start to happen when you become a full-time freelancer:

1. You accidentally end up working late nights.
2. You literally don’t know what’s going on in the morning.
3. You unfortunately have no time for relaxation.
4. You tell guys “I can’t, I’m busy”.
5. You surprisingly have difficulty delivering on schedule. Happens a lot
6. You have no time for your personal projects.
7. You have no hobbies or non-work-related interests. Basically you become boring.
8. You read less than two books in a month. That’s if you know that reading opens your mind. If you don’t, start now!!

Our main issue is every hour of the day might not be the same as the previous day.

Out of nowhere, things do come up that can throw us off schedule. So to get things in line, the biggest questions you must answer are:

1. What time do you start working?
2. How many hours will you work today?
3. How do you prioritize?
4. How often do you take breaks?

Before answering those questions, I must address the fact that as freelancers, we fear that we won’t find other work soon. Unless you are on a retainer, then count yourself a blessed soul. Whenever we get a project that takes 3-days, we normally slot it for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. But we forget we need to market ourselves and work on our personal projects.

Without anyone holding you accountable, your days can turn into a scheduling goulash. Without a scheduled time gets choppy. ~ Andy Adams

Just a friendly reminder, Time is money, my friend. So I nowadays stretch the project out like on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Just making sure I set the deadline, not the client. Most of the time they do but once in a while do have the upper hand. It’s your creative juice they are after, so remind them. ☺

Also, I schedule my clients to leave plenty of free time for vacations, travel, and weekly get-a-ways to the new restaurant/resort. I’m sure my Facebook explains it. ☺

Also for my meetings, whether on phone calls, in-person meetings, I hold them during those parts of the day when I’m less likely to get a lot done on projects when also clients are available. I make sure my clients know when I’m available for appointments.

Old Thinking vs New Thinking

My Timetable

From 5am: Wake up, DON’T check mail, morning walk/bike ride, stretch, meditate, shower, breakfast, get dressed

From 8am: Go to desk, go through urgent mail (30 mins only), emails and social media, review to-do’s, making phone calls, having meetings, designing logos, do biggest priorities, review status of projects

From 12pm: Have lunch

From 1pm: (Remove distractions meaning no emails, phone or social media sites) Client projects, write blog content, tasks for projects, mundane business tasks

From 7pm: Prepare dinner, plan tomorrow’s tasks, sleep at 10-11pm.

During breaks: Play video games, internet browsing, snacks, naps, small errands, gym, watch an episode

Tips for all of you

1. Don’t work too much. Even when we work for ourselves, we have to learn to call it a day.
2. Plan your time for work, and don’t do any work outside of that time. I’m sure all girlfriends, like mine, do appreciate that boundary. ☺
3. Work in 30 minutes break because when it is much longer than that, it gets uncomfortable. After accomplishing a large task, reward yourself with a break.
4. You’ll feel like you have plenty of time, so don’t procrastinate.
5. You can either be a morning lark, or a night owl, choose the work schedule that works for you. Stay true to your body clock. Try recognize your best working hours to increase the quality of work.
6. Don’t over plan your day, biting more than you can chew.
7. Create a “Burner List” which consists of tasks that you must get done that day. No matter what.
8. Limit distractions.
9. Don’t be afraid to say NO.
10. Automate every other work that you find are not an expert in like bookkeeping, legal, communications, etc.

Found this post useful? Kindly tap the 👏 button below! :)

About The Author

Lewis Ngugi is a Design Consultant. You can connect with him on Website, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

Scheduling your life as a Freelancer was originally published in Maverick Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It was a chilly morning, I had just slept 4 hours after a night’s coding session. I received a Slack message from the client. He is pissed!!!

The project pace was the issue. The main concern was they needed provision for actual dates along with what the client should expect from their end and even send proposed review/follow-up dates upon delivery.

That was gibberish to me at the time because this project was so rushed I didn’t even get time to organize myself leave alone the project.

The most painful part was when I was told, “You are ideally running this project and we are the clients, so I’d say it’s upon you to take lead on this and give us the regular feedback, updates and drive this project to it’s conclusion.”

Boom! Boom!! Boom!!! Boom!!!!

It’s a wrap ladies and gentlemen! I have been told to be more professional. Manage the project like the pro we believe you are!

Turning point

That was a wake-up call and I needed to do a serious 360 paradigm shift. So where do I go? Google Search obviously, my best and first option. I found books with 1200+ pages, 15-paged websites with the history of project management, images of diagrams and finally!! Guess what?

A MIRACLE!!!

It’s still work in progress. You never know, it might work for you agencies and freelancers out there! Plus, it makes you feel professional. :)

Task 1 — Project based channels

There was an already existing private Slack channel that was created separately for this project by the client. Tech-savvy clients. Team members were guys who were involved in the project, CTO and I!

We shared documents, images, links, and feedback in the channel. This keeps everybody up to speed on any changes in direction.

Task 2 — File Storage

I created a Dropbox folder for the project documents where the team and clients can access the legal documents, instead of always uploading them on Slack. All you do is copy the share link on to the Slack channel and you will be asked to integrate. Please do.

Task 3 — All files pinned to project channels

I pinned the Wireframe PDFs, Site Image JPGs, contract PDF to the channel so that every person knows what the team is contractually bound to do.

Task 4 — Project timelines

This is the miracle! I started using TeamGantt for creating project timelines and share with the clients team. Prior to this, I had used Excel to create the timeline which was A LOT OF WORK!! TeamGantt detailed out the intended timeline so easily, so I had the same expectations the client did. It also covered meetings and milestones.

The project timeline is then added as the description of the project channel in Slack.

Task 5 — Post weekly plan

I created a new Slack post every week and pinned it, replacing the post from the previous week. It outlines each individuals overarching goal for the week.

Task 6 — Integrate Trello with Slack

The Trello based workflow is important. You create cards and I use this style of listing tasks in projects as I work.

You can remind teammates in Slack about Trello card due dates, share Trello cards in Slack conversations.

Task 7 — Design

First, Information Architecture is an important step in UX. So start by creating Wireframes in Illustrator.

Then once the client approved, we were good to go forward with the design.

Task 8 — Integrate Photoshop with Zeplin

Now the best way I have come across for making life easier for the client and the development team is by using Zeplin. A masterpiece. You add the Zeplin Plugin onto Photoshop and you export the work to Zeplin.

Task 9 — Collaborate

The client can now give you feedback about design on Zeplin where you can defend your direction. All of this happens instant and records are kept on Slack when you integrate them.

Task 10 — Save the Developer

One of the beauties of Zeplin is it gives you CSS there and then. Smiles on the designer, project manager, client and developer.

In conclusion

The project ran smoothly and still learning ways to tweak my process. Please share your process on the comments’ section below.

Found this post useful? Kindly tap the 👏 button on the left side :)

About The Author

Lewis Ngugi is a Design Consultant. You can connect with him on Website, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

How we use Slack, Trello, TeamGantt, Illustrator, Photoshop and Zeplin for a design project. was originally published in Maverick Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Challenge

Brief: Redesign a part of the experience.

Duration: 2 days (Jan 2017).

My role: User Research and Interaction Designer.

Tools: Sketch, Adobe Experience Design.

Design Process: Redesigned an experience.

Summary

Desired Outcomes:

• Redesign an experience in the PesaPal that makes it easier for people to sign up.
• Deliver wireframes of redesigned experience.

Process:

• Designed wireframes.
• Deliver a working Prototype.

Insights-Decisions:

• Wanted to create a simple way of people registering.

Results:

• Delivered wireframes.
• Delivered a working prototype. This prototype needs more iteration on the menu and some of the screens.

Lessons Learned:

• It doesn’t take too long to redesign a part of an experience, but testing it is important to see if users would appreciate the redesign or if it would be useless.
• An engineer’s opinion is always useful to know if what you are designing is possible to code.

Case Study

User’s Problem:

It is difficult to manage another set of login details.

Solution:

Add sign up options via social network account on the App.

Persona:

I created a persona to have someone in mind when redesigning the flow.

Scenario:

After creating a persona, I decided to create a possible scenario:

1. Lucy has gotten a school fee payment reminder. She’s heading to a meeting. She remembers she heard of this new payments App called PesaPal.
2. She goes online to it on her laptop and finds Personal Solutions they are offering. She signs up.
3. Lucy sends fees to her daughter’s (Colleta) school.

Now VS Redesigned:

Wireframes

Current Sign Up.

New Sign Up.

Designs

Signing up in the current PesaPal App.

These are the redesigned designs.

Design Decisions:

Adaptive Placeholders:

Overcome most of the usability issues of float labels while saving space (something that is ideal especially for mobile devices). ~ Katie Sherwin

Sign Up Options:

Why force users to create another set of login details when you can let them login via an external account, such as a Facebook, Google or Twitter? ~ Nick Babich

Next Steps:

• User testing:

1. Find out if the sign up option would be useful for people.
2. Creating a prototype to test it easily.

Day 1: PesaPal UX in Sign Up Form was originally published in Maverick Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Eye-tracking technology used by TheLadders revealed that recruiters spend an average of 19 percent of their time on your LinkedIn profile simply viewing your picture. The research also revealed that just like resumes, weak organization, and scannability within a LinkedIn profile negatively impacted the recruiter’s ability to “process the profile”.

Here’s how to build a Killer LinkedIn Profile.

+1: The Photo

A picture is worth a thousand words

It is especially true for your profile picture. Make sure it is a professional photo and not a picture of you at the beach.

+2: Profile to 100%

A complete LinkedIn profile (scoring 100%, or becoming an “all-star”) is 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn because completed profile ranks higher in the internal algorithm when displaying search results. You need to have over 50 connections to have an All-Star profile.

+3: Strong job title

Creating your own “Headline”/ Job Title — which appears in search results beneath your name and photo, you are given the ability to harness the power to craft your personal brand.

4+: Keywords in Skills & Endorsements

Drive keyword density so you show up in searches that include the relevant terms, technologies and tools that you are familiar.

5+: Beef that Summary

This should be in paragraph form — 3 paragraphs or less. The summary tells the story of who you are, to express your value proposition and the brand messaging you have on your resume.

6+: Call-to-action

Here, people are to be prompted to learn more or even reach out, off your LinkedIn profile. Also sharing your code from GitHub by sharing links on your LinkedIn homepage, groups, etc and checking out some of you design samples at portfolioname.com.

7+: Order your sections

If you have taken some courses and/or done individual projects for yourself, you can curate your profile in a way that draws attention to the best portions.

8+: List your projects

Put a list of what you and your team built, links to the project and a description of what went down.

9+: Join & Participate in Speciality Groups

Join Groups to keep up to date with industry developments, to share useful links with LinkedIn members with similar interests, to participate in discussions and to raise your profile.

10+: List industry certifications

Show you know the trade by virtue that you reached out to particular vendors, and got acquainted with their platforms.

11+: Hide the “People Also Viewed” box

Usually, LinkedIn displays people who possess similar skills and experience as yourself (and thus would also be of interest to recruiters). Remove this box under your “Privacy & Settings”.

Well the above is how you show it.
Have a Cheerful New Year
Fellow Designers and Developers!

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About The Author

Lewis Ngugi is the User Experience Specialist of Safaricom Alpha. You can connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

Revamp Your LinkedIn Profile was originally published in Maverick Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was seeking great insights, well-researched articles and some inspiration in the realm of UX, so I headed to Twitter and Medium to follow these industry’s UX-centric biggest names from Kenya. Unfortunately, I am still confused because I thought there’s an online active community of UX and Product Designers from Kenya that love sharing information.

Anyway, I hope 2017 will be a year of sharing info, sharing knowledge, sharing power.

Please note the list is not in order of a ranking scale

Tosh Juma

Tosh Juma on Twitter

Winding up a great design workshop to design creative storytelling platforms for our 2017... https://t.co/yRoW1805MN

Kagonya Awori

Kagonya :) on Twitter

What African countries can learn 1. UX is not (just) UI. " Talk by @susandra #tajriba

Mark Kamau

UX Africa on Twitter

Sharing Infographics design tips with @OpenSocietyEA partners #design #HCD #UX @iHubUXLab

Why Bad User Experience is Expensive

Anthony Magayu

anthony magayu on Twitter

@Amuty @iHub @DevCraftKE @kiruik @MuthuriKinyamu Very sad indeed. It's time UX is put ahead of Dev here. We should start #UXMovementKe

Fady Rostom

Fady Rostom on Twitter

All too often, humanity and human nature couldn't be further apart.

Michael Muli

Michael Muli on Twitter

What a wonderful implementation, supporting the well-known fact that #video is a great #storytelling medium. https://t.co/5AMIP1wk9C #UX

Marie Amuti

Marie Amuti on Twitter

We designers, we don't work in a vacuum. We need business people. We are not the fine artists we are often confused with..." - Dieter Rams

Maryann Wangari

Maryann Wangari on Twitter

Fear is the sign that a growth-inducing challenge might lie ahead. #StorytellingforInfluence #HCD

Abigael Wangui

Kaiju lover on Twitter

Clients who ask for free work in exchange "for exposure". #WorstDesignClients #BehanceReviews @iHubUXLab @iHub

Kipkorir Kirui

Kipkorir Kirui on Twitter

Why does the atm give back your card before the money? UX #QA

Edna Chelule

Edna Chelule on Twitter

UX is more than user interface research and design, it includes business-centric strategy. @ThatMax @ericschaffer @nomondedinizulu #UXnotUI

Frankline Mogoi

Frankline Mogoi on Twitter

UX Quote: "UX is not about ideas. It's about making ideas happen" - Scott Belsky @iHubUXLab

Maureen Macharia

Maureen Macharia on Twitter

Journey Maps: Map out a users chain of events, understand the process flow across channels and touchpoints #UX at #Tajriba2015 @iHubUXLab

Sharon Wangari

sharon on Twitter

Good UI is not trivial or simple - solid UX, killer visuals, and effective interaction are all part of the formula. http://t.co/myOrAI4eRl

Muthuri Kinyamu

Muthuri Kinyamu on Twitter

I am setting up a small kiosk online to sell happiness, positive vibes and memorable experiences - all year round. What should I call it?

Susaneve Oguya

susaneve oguya on Twitter

Experience innovation will be a crucial component for companies seeking to remain relevant and retain customers #UX via @co.design

Huston Malande

Huston Malande on Twitter

Tomorrow is World Usability Day, and I'll be speaking at the Google event at 2pm, at the @iHub. Pop in if you can: https://t.co/zz1WlVf4W3

Kennedy Kahiri

Kahiriken on Twitter

I wrote an article of how @TwigaFoods is adding value to the farmers by providing efficient market access logistics. https://t.co/p95sBIpmjX

Wangu Mwenda

We live in a society 🇰🇪 on Twitter

Designers aren't artists. Visual design is usually one of the last things you look at as a UX designer. Prioritization typically goes to variables like functionality, usability, interaction & behavior. https://t.co/FmidQMIQkO

Sharon Ngaira

Have any name suggestions, leave a comment at the end of the article.

Found this post useful? Kindly tap the 👏 button below! :)

About The Author

Lewis Ngugi is a UX/UI designer in Nairobi focusing in digital design, brand identity and product design. You can connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

UX folks in Kenya that you have to follow was originally published in Maverick Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

First off, this is from a recruitment and retention perspective with understanding that millennials are now the driving force within the global economy and they expect more transparency, more honesty, and a more personal approach.

1. Employees are the biggest risk vs Employees are the biggest asset
   If you treat your employees with respect and you involve them in your decision making, they’ll go the extra mile for you, regardless of their job title. Your employees are your most critical influencers.

“Culture is about performance, and making people feel good about how they contribute to the whole.” ~ Tracy Streckenbach interview, Clear Goals Matter More than Mission, The New York Times

2. Top Down Communication vs Open Communication
Open communication fosters loyalty and a commitment to job performance excellence. It provides employees access to executives which develops an organizational synergy.

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” ~ George Bernard Shaw, playwright

3. Skill over behavior vs Behavior over skill
How often have you heard “gain trust” or “build rapport”?

“If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.” ~ Simon Sinek

4. Manage Time vs Empower results
The future of work is in autonomy. If you keep a tight leash on your employees, your company will suffer in the long run.

“It isn’t effective or productive to force your employees to do anything. Choice empowers people and makes for a more content workforce.” ~ Sir Richard Branson

5. Rigid Work Schedule vs Flexible Work Schedule
Allowing your employees flexibility in their schedules — whether that means working from home, flex hours or unlimited vacation time — it will only serve to benefit the bottom line.

“It has a positive effect on corporate culture. Employees know that you trust them, are not micromanaging them, and are providing them the flexibility to work from where they want, when they want, as long as they are delivering results.” ~ Shapiro.

6. At your Desk vs Mobile
Mobility has allowed workers to work from anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection, and it’s quickly becoming the norm. Giving employees freedom to work from home or have flexible, non-traditional schedules can help boost morale.

“Bolting an employee to their desk is unlikely to improve your business outcomes.” ~ Shapiro

7. Work for the Weekend vs Do Something You Love
Research shows that great work (award-winning work) is produced when people focus on doing something others love. The Great Work Study showed that 88% of projects that earned awards began with an employee asking their own version of the question

What difference could I make that other people would love?

8. Corporate Jargon vs Genuine Honesty
Business jargon confuses and alienates employees while hampering productivity more often than it helps resulting in the ‘curse of knowledge’. Striving for clarity and simplicity in directions, requests, inquisitions, and goal setting will help to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals.

“To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.” ~ Tony Robbins

9. Double Standard vs One standard
Again, black and white. The owner of a company can do whatever he wants. The employee of the company has to do what the employer says. Sorry, different standards. You can also have some opportunity — or no opportunity. Take your pick.

10. Fear of Failure vs Fail often and fast
Learn from failure and embrace failure. The central pieces to this are: how well you experiment, how you create your experiments and how you learn from them. It’s not about taking a big risk and failing.

“Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.” ~ Mark Zuckerberg

11. Enrich Shareholders vs Enrich Lives
Engaged employees are more likely to put customers first and are less likely to leave their jobs, brings higher employee satisfaction and motivation, which increases business profitability and ROI.

“If you look after your staff, they’ll look after your customers. It’s that simple.” ~ Sir Richard Branson

In a nutshell

Engaging employees nowadays is not just about giving them the script; it’s about ensuring employees are the story.

Found this post useful? Kindly tap the 👏 button below! :)

About The Author

Lewis Ngugi is the Experience Lead of Kazi+. You can connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

Old Thinking vs New Thinking was originally published in Maverick Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What’s the problem?

Poor design!

It creates friction. The less the design aligns with what the user is trying to accomplish, the more friction increases. Whenever friction occurs, someone becomes frustrated. The user ,may feel the frustration because they can’t complete their task. Take Sally, for instance. She is a 52-year-old grandmother, married to a peasant farmer. She is currently learning to use a smartphone to help out with enquiries coming from her grandkids who need to take care of her. She is normally very active but has recently been hampered by low vision, but struggles to accept it. Many everyday tasks are now difficult and time-consuming. She does have her reading glasses which she often has to search for. Sending money to the wrong number caused her ,as the customer, to call the organisation’s toll-free number (100) which increased Safaricom’s number of required call centre operators at Jambo Call Centre (JCC). For sure, Safaricom “felt” the frustration with a monetary impact. They measured the cost of handling a support call by dividing the support budget for a year by the quantity of calls they can handle and decided to put an end to it. How?? We will illustrate through the eyes of Sally.

About M-PESA

(For those who haven’t tried M-PESA)

Uber, Facebook, Alibaba and Airbnb are very different companies. They have different cultures, products and cost structures, they all face different risks, and have grown along different trajectories. So, what do these companies have in common? Their products do not live in the background of our lives; we think about them and interact with them every day. What those technologies do is enable existing infrastructure to be used more effectively.

Google, Facebook and Paypal are all steadily rolling out new-fangled services to turn our smartphones into digital wallets, replacing cash and cheques. Not forgetting Apple and other guys of course. Something big has been going on. M-PESA. Mobile banking, Kenya’s safer and secure alternative currency. More than two-thirds of the adult population are using M-PESA; around 25% of the country’s gross domestic national product flows through the system.

Click a few keys, exchange a few numbers, and it’s done. With just a mobile phone and a registration with Safaricom, you can pay anything in seconds, no cash, no long queues. When I was at ARK, we were huge fans of Safaricom since they introduced the Hakikisha service, they spent quite a few millions on the campaign I might say. I remembered they must have lots of talented designers and product people, because they nailed so much of the whole experience, with the critical goal being; You can now confirm who you send money to. Optimising the customer journey with products like #Hakikisha. This enhancement to M-PESA will enable you to confirm the name of the intended recipient of the funds, before completing an M-PESA transaction. However, there’s this tiny detail on the menu which keeps bugging us.

What’s the big deal?

We assessed the M-PESA Menu’s usability against International Standards: BS EN-ISO 9241–110:2006 Ergonomics of human-system interaction — Part 110: Dialogue principles.

(Total Marks: 7/14)

• Is the dialogue suitable for the user’s task and skill level? (Suitability for the task) 1
• Does the dialogue make it clear what the user should do next? (Self-descriptiveness) 2
• Is the dialogue consistent? (Conformity with user expectations) 2
• Does the dialogue support learning? (Suitability for learning) 1
• Can the user control the pace and sequence of the interaction? (Controllability) 1
• Is the dialogue forgiving? (Error tolerance) 0
• Can the dialogue be customised to suit the user? (Suitability for individualisation) 0

Existing Flow in M-PESA

For those who do not use M-PESA quite regularly, here’s the existing process of “sending money to someone” -

When the application is opened, by default, a list of services being offered, then you choose Send Money, type in the recipients phone number (assuming you have crammed it).

Fill in the amount, your personal PIN and get a confirmation of the transaction details. Clearly the title of the dialog popup needs to be changed.

Fantastic! It’s sent! Wait! What? I should wait for M-PESA to reply since you’ve sent it? If that is so, why can I cancel the transaction and you’ve already sent it?

Okay,yes it’s them I’m sending to.

The problem- Now, here I believe that the bigger problem is not I send any letter or number within 25 seconds!!! Poor Sally. I hope she can remember to read the disclaimer and she does it fast enough. The bigger problem I feel is the button labelling of the popup dialog interface. It is difficult for the user to understand that by pressing CANCEL they are allowing the transaction to proceed and he/she has to type in a character within a given time limit of 25 seconds then tap on the SEND button to STOP the transaction. The Hakikisha message’s placement on the dialog popup is easily overlooked among a profusion of other design elements.

Then, on the left, we have this beautiful popup after you press any button and hit send; to stop the transaction. On the right, you just hit cancel to send the money. Still confused.

Yeah! Sally is very confused right now.

Insights

Now to our main focus. Offer a Cancel button when users may fear that they have committed to something they want to avoid. Having an explicit way to Cancel provides an extra feeling of safety that is not afforded by simply leaving. Cancel is mainly useful for multi-step dialogs where the user has progressed past one or more pages with actions. At this time, pressing the Back button will not undo these actions and it would be better if the user would click Cancel.

Design Recommendation

Safaricom should offer STOP button to cancel the transaction. In addition to button functionalities, the SEND button should be for submitting the transaction. This option is good enough to give users the control whether they want to stop the transaction, or allow it to proceed.

Finally, amazing Safaricom designers out there, please consider this! It’ll make our experience even smoother. :)

Found this post useful? Kindly tap the 👏 button below! :)

About The Author

Lewis Ngugi is the Experience Lead of Kazi+. You can connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

UX folks in Kenya that you have to follow

Why Bad User Experience is Expensive was originally published in Maverick Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Anybody who’s been a developer/designer for long enough has been productive using code snippets.

So how do we do we become ninjas?? We will accomplish this by creating snippets in Sublime Text.

Now a snippet in Sublime Text is a block of code that is injected into your working document when triggered to make your work easier and faster.

Now let’s do this!!!

Step 1

So to create a snippet, go to ‘Tools’ > ‘New Snippet’.

Step 2

Doing the above step will inject a new snippet template into a new tab. You can now start customising it to suit your needs.

Step 3

These are the sections that you will edit:

1. Content

<content><![CDATA[
Hello, ${1:this} is a ${2:snippet}.
]]></content>

The actual snippet. This is where the code you want to be outputted goes. The content must be included in the <![CDATA[…]]> section.

2. tabTrigger

<! — Optional: Set a tabTrigger to define how to trigger the snippet →
 <! — <tabTrigger>bootstrap</tabTrigger> →

This is where you put the sequence of keys that you want to trigger the snippet with (e.g. ‘bootstrap’). The snippet will be injected after you type your chosen set of keys and hit the Tab key.

3. Scope

<! — Optional: Set a scope to limit where the snippet will trigger →
 <! — <scope>source.html</scope> →

The scope selector determines the context of where the snippet can be used. Mostly you wouldn’t want a HTML snippet to be injected into your CSS file. So you will do this:

e.g. <scope>source.html</scope>, <scope>source.css</scope>

If you want it to be used anywhere you want, you just delete the line of code.

4. Description
This is used to give the snippet more information when viewing the snippet in the Snippets menu. This is optional and if not present, Sublime Text defaults to the name of the snippet.

You can use this tag:

<description> </description>

5. Fields

${1:title}

Field markers can be used in your snippet to cycle through certain positions in your snippet once it has been injected. To move to the next marker, all you need to do is press the Tab key (or Shift + Tab to go backwards).

Step 4

Once you are happy with your snippet, you will need to save it to the ‘Users’ folder in the package directory.

To bring up the packages folder, go to the ‘Sublime Text’ > ‘Preferences’ > ‘Browse Packages…’

When you have launched the ‘Packages’ directory, save your snippet into the ‘Users’ folder.

Make sure your snippet is saved with the extension ‘.sublime-snippet’.

e.g. bootstrap.sublime-snippet

Note: You might have to re-start Sublime Text 2 for your snippet to take effect.

Step 5

If you find yourself not being able to remember your snippet, you can always find your snippet in the ‘Tools’ > ‘Snippet’ menu.

Or by using Command + Shift + P and searching for it.

Here is the snippet I have created for bootstrap skeleton feel free to take a look. Please as good developers, we need to share these resources, so you can fork the repo and add more snippets. Let’s make the world a better place.

Conclusion

I hope this best practice is interesting and will be useful during coding. Remember, part of the reason duplication creeps into code is the ease of copy/paste/modify operations to create new code. Refactoring is perhaps more work than copy/paste in the short term, but stamping out duplication can only help in the longer run. Refactoring is an invaluable skill that’s well worth your time. So go for DRY Principle.

Thank you!

Originally published at www.web-design-weekly.com

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About The Author

Lewis Ngugi is the Experience Lead of Kazi+. You can connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

Speeding up typing was originally published in Maverick Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.