Cohort 10 UX Designer Strategist

Current Position: Senior Human (user) Experience @Miprint Consulting with ABSA

It is not every day that one gets to be the opening act at a leadership summit with guest speakers consisting of the likes of Yolanda Cuba (Group Vice President Southern and East Africa Region at MTN Group), Dr Aisha Pandor (co-founder of SweepSouth), Melvyn Lubega (GO1 Director) to name a few. Tsholofelo’s “Chaos rebirth” poem received applause as he really captured the journey of why we need to find our why, live for it, and make our mark in the global village. These reflections aren’t just words on paper, as I discovered in conversations with Tsholofelo.

His own journey as a creative entrepreneur – “the most difficult business model there is” as he put it – has seen him take risks by speaking up against injustices in the advertising agency he was working at which lead to his contract not being renewed – “Ah…Ntate Hloni, you know those nice words they use akere”. Tsholofelo continued the hustle of being a creative, landing contracts as he went along, but not compromising his own ubuntu values of putting people first. A compass for him is “honour your light and your light will shine for you”.

Tapping into their Human Centred Design skills learned at Umuzi and honed over the years in the industry, Tsholofelo, Keletso Moagi (Cohort 12 UI Design) and Sihle Dube (a colleague) recently won The ABSA Design Hackathon with their creative innovation of “a banking app that sees the user as a human and not just a customer”. One of the big insights gained from Tsholofelo was that “a user sometimes doesn’t want a tech solution, but this is a means to an end. A tool”. This rings so true to many users who pull their beard out when batting to navigate around certain UI that clearly didn’t have the user in mind.

It is awesome when potential clients and/or employers see the great work that you are doing. Tsholofelo landed ABSA as a client nogal. As a Senior UX Designer, I am hoping we will begin to see the changes in the palms of our hands and know that one who we had the honour to play table tennis against, share chips from Babbly, and simply rub shoulders with is making our own user experience more and more human friendly.

Keep your eye glued to his book launching soon, title “The art of the love vibrations”.

“There is a method to the madness and a symphony to our victory”—Tsholofelo Radebe.

Cohort 13 Data Science

Current Position: AWS re/Start Cloud Practitioner | Technical Support

The idea of walking into my favourite supermarket store, pilling the shopping bag with the essentials and walking out the store without the famous “PING…TELLER 5…” or being greeted by “please swipe your card” was something I never thought I’d live to witness in my lifetime in South Africa. The future is now indeed thanks to one of our very own, Tsholofelo Mautjana who recently worked with the team which launched one such store in Cape Town. As a Data Annotator, or as some like to refer to them as “The Human Learning Machine”, Tsholofelo worked closely with teaching AI how to recognise what a customer was packing in their shopping bag, and for them to be charged the correct amount without ever needing to touch their wallet.

One downside of online shopping for some is one cannot, as yet, touch and feel the product. This next generation of stores allows the shopper to slap and feel their steak before buying it. I cannot wait to see more of these stores being rolled out across our neighbourhoods, and the awesome re-skilling opportunity it’ll provide for cashiers as well as till packers.

Whilst re-skilling and upskilling, Tsholofelo got to work with American based farmers through the use of drones, assessing the data the drones were collecting on the crops and feeding that information back to the farmers who would subsequently make necessary preventative changes to their farming, thus maximising the yield on their very own crops. She currently has her eyes set on becoming a fully qualified AWS Cloud Specialist, a pathway which Umuzi will be launching through African Coding Network in June 2022. Keep your eyes glued on our various platforms for this opportunity, as spaces are limited for the June intake.