Rethinking UX Methods and Metrics for AI Applications

The design industry is at a crossroads. As artificial intelligence becomes integral to our work, we must ask: whose values and perspectives shape the systems we use and build? For African researchers and practitioners, this moment requires recentering African wisdom — ensuring our languages, experiences, and cultural realities inform both design practice and AI futures.

In this keynote, I will draw on YUX Design’s years of conducting ethnographic research across Africa, from Senegal to Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, with tech companies like Google, Wikipedia and humanitarian organisations like the Gates Foundation, MSF. Our work has underscored the importance of humility, proximity, and local languages in research, while also revealing the challenges of navigating diverse cultural contexts and infrastructures. These lessons have shaped our understanding of how to design with, not just for, African communities.

Today, with AI reshaping design and our interaction with technology, YUX has launched the Cultural AI Lab to explore what AI means for Africans and our futures. Through projects like Afristereo — a cultural stereotype dataset for Nigeria, Kenya, and Senegal, Nakala AI — a speech recognition tool for Wolof in the domain of Maternal Health and AIUX — a study of how people across four countries understand and trust generative AI, we are working to embed cultural specificity and prevent harm in emerging technologies.

These efforts point to a new challenge: defining culturally relevant UX metrics and methods that enable a human-centred and scalable evaluation of AI products in the African context. UX research, in this context, becomes more than a research tool—it becomes a compass guiding us through the uncertainties of AI, ensuring that African voices shape not just design, but the futures we collectively imagine.