PrePair - Mentorship APP
Mentoring is an invaluable way to share vital knowledge and relevant experiences with others with the desire to help them succeed in their personal and professional aspirations. This application allows mentors and people seeking advice to be matched, based on similar interest, location, and availability. Making this connection in a way that empowers both parties involved by allowing them to gain something substantial this connection.
Project: Case Study
Role: UX research, Prototyping, UI design
Duration: 2 weeks, Mar. 20’
Tools: Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator, Protopie
Problem
The problem is that new students find it difficult and intimidating to seek for suitable mentors to engage with. While experienced students say it's difficult to carve-out time and actively seek out students in need and are unsure if their guidance would truly help.
01. Research
As an international student at Parsons who is new to New York city, I know I would have appreciated a way for me to easily connect with experienced students who could help me with the transition. I wanted to understand: why students need mentorship, how students currently find their mentors, and what the goals of mentors are.
User Interviews
I researched existing mentorship programs and interviewed students studying in New York City and New Jersey. Through these interviews I wanted to understand what distinguished the most successful mentor-mentee pairs from the pack. What did they have in common? Overall I sent out an online survey and received 20 different responses from students across from 5 different colleges including Cornell, Columbia, NYU, The New School, and Rutgers University. 10 of them have participated in mentorship programs as a mentor while the 5 of them were mentees. 5 of them were neither a mentor or mentee but was interested in connecting with other students with similar professional and educational goals.
Through these interviews I was able to gather these main insights and visions:
02. Synthesis
User personas
Based on the user research, I created two personas to help me design an experience that focuses around the needs and frustrations of the users by empathizing with students and their goals. The main target users were university/college students. Specifically, those who were new to university or less experienced and wanted guidance (mentees), and those who were upper years or more experienced students who wanted to share their expertise and give advice (mentors).
user Journey
Most of the complaints toward mentoring fell on the side of formal mentorship. People were unaware that mentorship can take shape in the form of a casual conversation with family and friends. Furthermore, mentors and mentees have not been entirely educated on how broad and diverse mentorship can be. Every user has a different learning style and curve, each person needs a slightly different approach in order to maximize their full potential. I have laid out the user journey for both the mentee and mentor down below.
Below shows the users' emotional journey to ensure every touchpoint of the application is engaging and motivating. Below shows the process of understanding and achieving the goals of both the mentee and mentor in connection to each other.
Design Principles
Based on the objectives above, I defined 3 design principles.
03. Design
Sketches
I started by sketching out a few different versions of the user onboarding pages, profile pages, and messaging pages. After a few paper sketches, I had an initial design that I tested with 3 different users. I focused on evaluating time on task, feature discovery and general feedback. I was able to start sketching the main user flow and several other ideas for various screens. My goal here was to visualize the user interface, user interactions and flow of the app.
User Journey (Onboarding)
In this iteration, the process of becoming both a mentor and mentee is the same in order to increase student involvement.
LOW-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
In this early iteration, the process of becoming both a mentor and mentee is the same in order to increase student involvement.
For the main feature of connectivity, I wanted to focus on the personal wants of the user. The explore profile page generates a stream of photos from potential matches who have the same interests and availability.
04. MVP HIGHLIGHTS
HIGH-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
I kept the design clean and simple, and the mentor and mentee experiences are largely similar. These interfaces is designed to create a personal-feeling matching experience. The color scheme is purple, pink, and green to represent inspiration, freshness, trust, and empowerment.
User Onboarding
Mentor’s View
1. From the main draw menu, users can filter their profile page.
2. Explore Mentor’s profiles is aimed to help students get a face-to-face sense of potential mentees/mentors.
3. The additional interests features allows the mentorship to revolve around personality and life experiences.
4. Message allows users to connect with their network online and easily keep track of when specific video calls or meet ups are coming up.
Mentee’s View
5. Allowing users to focus on a set number of interactions rather than an excess number will also increase the amount of time dedicated per mentorship.
6. The prominence of the tips button is to show users the importance of have a positive relationship with their mentor/mentee. This feature will raise awareness on how to identify the ‘right’ mentor and how to successfully communicate experiences and ideas.
Reflection & Next Steps
I took on this design challenge knowing that this subject matter is very common and there are numerous mentorship platforms that already exist. I discovered my passion for mentoring and coaching individuals and to build a design-centric community within the organization. I loved to be able to create a better mentor-mentee interaction rather than a casual conversation and not have it feel like a work meeting.
Dismantle the power dynamic between a mentor and mentee: Can this relationship be seen in a new light, by changing the way responsibilities associated with being a mentor or someone seeking advice are perceived today.
Next Steps
This quick design challenge only looked at very limited scenarios and tested on a few aspects of the user interface design. Moving on, I hope to explore more ways to express thoughtfulness and clarity for each feature. I would do another round of usability testing with the high fidelity design to confirm some of my interface design assumptions.