Helping first year students to adjust to their new campus by allowing them to discover and connect with mentors.
UX Designer
7 Days
Solo
Your school wants to strengthen the community by encouraging experienced students to connect with new students and help them adjust to campus life. Design an experience that allows mentors and mentees to discover each other. Consider the needs of both mentors and mentees, including how someone may become a mentor and how to connect mentors to mentees
The school connects Uni Mentor to their G Suite.
All fourth-year students can become mentors.
All first year students at school are automatically enrolled into Uni Mentor.
Mentors need to be able to add their availability schedule.
Mentors should be able to communicate with mentees that they think they can help.
Mentors should be rewarded in some way for becoming mentors.
Mentees should be able to find a mentor that they feel comfortable communicating with.
Mentees should be able to communicate with more than one mentor.
Mentees should be able to schedule a meetup with mentor.
After finishing my interviews, I noted all the answers and listed them as insights. From these insights, I was able to organize the features I was going to design. All these features were focused on an “experience that allows mentors and mentees to discover each other, including how to become a mentor and how to connect mentors to mentees”
One of the main insights was that mentees would be able to discover and connect to mentors based on factors besides interests and major.
Having organized my thoughts on the research script, I was able to extract four main insights.
Having organized my thoughts on the research script, I was able to extract four main insights.
It was important for mentors to be able to set up their availability to avoid stress and disappointment.
Based on my insights and the personas I created according to the research interview script, I was able to list my product goals and their respective features.
I started brainstorming product goals based on my vision: to help strengthen the school community.
My next step was to write down as many features as I could think of and relate each to a product goal.
My last step was to pick my four favourite features and brainstorm scenarios related to each one.
When my research had determined my four main features, I sketched those four scenarios.
1. Discover and connect to a mentor
2. Set up availability (Mentor side)
3. Sharing an event with students
4. Messaging your mentor
Mentors and Mentees enter different values as they onboard. Other participants are not viewable unless those values match each other.
The mentee will be given the best match: multiple matched values and major.
There will be more than one mentor assigned to each mentee. The mentee has a choice between all mentors that they’re best matched with.
I took a step back to focus more on the onboarding process and how mentees discover mentors.
When onboarding, the user will enter certain values. These values are more a bit more personal than just idle interests, so they’re not viewable unless a student matches with a mentor. These values will help the mentee find their best match and—more importantly—be comfortable being around the mentors.
When searching for a mentor, mentees can view the best matched profiles based on the values they entered, as well as other profiles. After reviewing those profiles, mentees can message or schedule an appointment with a potential mentor.
There was a lot of preparation. I learned to manage my time by focusing only on results that would actually solve the problem.
Going in depth with features helped me with my process, but I went slightly overboard. I had to reprioritise some of the process so I could focus more on the main problem.
In future, I need to set my eyes only on the brief and not lose focus on the main problem. When I was halfway through, I realized I was focusing on features that had less to do with the brief.
I want to go more into depth with the values and how they will affect the matchmaking and connecting. I still wanted to showcase what I designed so I added the additional screens.
I want to get more feedback from students that have experience with discovering and connecting to a mentor.
My goal was to turn in a prototype, or video scenario, but time got away from me.
