Amha

  • 6 transformative retail trends for 2023

    Useful ideas Augmented Retail: Post COVID-19 lockdown, there has been a stabilization with offerings like click and collect, and simultaneously there has been a return to the store, a reinvigoration of physical retail. Ma described this as one of the positive consequences of the pandemic, that the inability to visit stores actually made them more…

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  • New Role: Joining Mastercard’s global CX team in New York

    My 5 year journey leading experience design for Mastercard’s Lab for Financial Inclusion, in Kenya, has come to an end. I officially joined Mastercard’s Global Customer Experience & Design team and am once again based in New York City. In my new role as Director of Product Experience Design, my work will focus on Commercial…

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  • New Role: Director of User Experience at MasterCard’s Lab for Financial Inclusion

    Today I begin a new chapter in Kenya, where I’ll serve as Director of User Experience for MasterCard’s Lab for Financial Inclusion. I’m both excited and humbled to step into this role. In this position, I’ll manage the end-to-end product design process for innovation across Sub-Saharan Africa. That means guiding ideas from concept to design, prototyping, building, and ultimately launching…

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  • Design mentorship during Mastercards take initiative innovation challenge

    Take Initiative is an internal Mastercard program that brings employees from across the globe together for a 2-day innovation challenge. Unlike a traditional hackathon, Take Initiative emphasizes strategy and product-market fit. To win, teams need a working demo, a compelling story, and a reasonable business case. This year, I flew to Kenya to take part. It was my…

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  • How animation and motion are informing experience design – SXSW insights

    Digital experiences are increasingly using animation to inform, engage, and delight users. At SXSW, I attended two sessions that explored how Disney’s classic 12 Principles of Animation can be applied to modern experience design. Back in the 1930s, Disney animators asked a simple but profound question: What makes animation good? To answer it, they studied animals in zoos and…

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  • Psychological Architectures for Persuasive Tech — SXSW Workshop Insights

    At SXSW, I attended an engaging workshop titled “Psychological Architectures for Persuasive Tech.” The session explored key concepts of persuasion and influence, with the goal of helping people build lasting habits. The presenter, Brian Cugelman, Ph.D., introduced his Interactive Influence Model, a framework inspired by Robert Cialdini’s classic book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. What stood out was how Cugelman applied communication…

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  • My experiences with Mozilla’s FireFoxOS

    Firefox OS has a grand ideal it is pursuing: to deliver an open sourced operating system powered by the web developer community. Mozilla is trying to promote and expand the scope of HTML5 and other open web technologies on mobile devices. Generally speaking, ideals or principles are wonderful because they push work to aim for…

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