MentorU

Design challenge UX ResearchUI Design

To design a platform that lets Mentees (Learners/Students) connect with a Mentor of their choice so that they can receive relevant guidance and knowledge and make the right career decisions.

Process

As initially for every project I ask few research questions from myself to better understand the context. Here are some questions I wanted to get answers by the end of this project -

• Why does mentorship matters?
• Why do we need a mentor?
• Why should a mentor guide you/invest time in someone?
• From where do we find a mentor?
• How could one believe in anyone’s advice?
• How a mentee would get to know whether this mentor is good for him/her or not?

Surveys — Now, after knowing few of things I moved to conducting a survey , I floated a Google form among my peers, in 1 day I got only responses from around 20 students, unfortunately in this those who fills the form are only mentees. As I don’t want to wait much to get more responses, as it’s timed challenge, so I focused more on 1-1 interview, in which I talked with 4 students who seek mentorship and 2 mentors who want to provide mentorship.

Semi-Structured Interviews - Talking directly with users give me much more insights about what they want and what are their pain points. As I mentioned above my main focus was here to get more & more insights as I didn’t get much value from the survey, although I got to know about their needs through it. But still, I want to know more about their pain points, as my whole solution would based on that only.

Market Research - This is one of interesting thing I like to do, I explore different applications already existing in the market, also read and analyze data from different sources to validate some of my assumptions that I made. Doing secondary research provides me some new information that sometimes misses in a 1-1 interview or surveys. Some of the market findings -

Tinder

Tinder is not exactly a competitor but, it helps in providing some value how it helps its users to match with each other without even knowing them, what’s the motivation behind users that makes them use the application.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is somewhat related to the context, but not exactly, it’s main focus was not onto helping mentee to find mentors, but users can request other people to be their mentor, so I thought of understanding its features and applications too.

Shows how much important is mentorship :)

Now I got the data from the research but that data is not categorized in a proper way to make the information. So, to make the information out of data, I made personas and state the problems that I understood from the research.

Some of the research insights that i found -

• Following Up with each other after one call is difficult, especially when you’re first time meeting the mentor.
• Mentorship should feel natural, it’s not like answering one or two questions but it’s more about guiding the mentee through the whole process.
• Everyone specially mentee should value time of each & everyone.

Mentor Persona

Mentee Persona

Problems from Mentors -

• It’s hard to connect with someone having no common value, interests and majors.
• It’s little difficult to maintain work life and devoting time to mentoring.
• As of now there’s no common platform where mentees can schedule meets and chat.
• It’s hard to share things that are common to some mentees, teaching same thing again on 1-1 is tedious.

Problems from Mentees -

• Sometimes after choosing a mentor, there’s no way to go back and cancel any meeting, in case mentee doesn’t like the mentor.
• Similarly as of now there’s no common platform where user can seek mentorship from mentors.
• If sometimes got a chance to get mentorship from mentor, then time doesn’t match with each other schedule.

Here comes the most interesting and one of my favourite part i.e. brainstorming, in this I try to generate as much as ideas possible, and then choosing the best from it. In this first time I perform the Crazy8’s activity and it really gives some interesting options to choose from.

I generally prefer pen & paper for all of my activities whether it’s making wireframes, user flow , architecture or anything, as it gives me ample space to make mistakes and do better.

Here’s my Crazy 8’s sheet

Few Screenshots of my wireframes

The very first thing is choosing the right color and then the right typeface beause it’s the color and font that makes or breaks the design, here I choose the shade of blue as my primary color because blue is something that denotes peace, security and makes some order.

For Typeface I choose “Inter” as Heading and “Nunito Sans” for body copy and other labels. Reason for choosing these typefaces is as both are sans- serif and these works perfectly on small screens and increase the legibility

IMP - You can directly click on the video to listen to the whole prototype rather than reading the whole text (Yes, that’s my voice :p)

For Mentee -

For Mentor -

Click Here to view the prototype

Phew, after a continuous hard work, I learn some beautiful things and understand few things that may be improved -

• One of the learning is while conducting surveys if it doesn’t give you adequate data then focus on 1-1 interviews, as they could prove to be very useful and help you in getting some better insights.
• Don’t rush for the solution, first properly understand the problem & concept.
• Now, few things I could do more better if I had more time is creating more iterations (at least 2-3) to better solve the problem, may be conducting a test with prototype too and see whether user can easily able to perform the tasks or not.
• I could design few screens for some other use cases too for ex - how’s the screen look when mentee try to give review to the mentor or how a mentor can check his reviews or how the call screen would look or from where do user can access the recordings of the sessionif I had more time. (These could be accomodated in Settings/Profile section)
• I found Crazy 8’s to be useful especially when you need to generate more ideas in a shorter span of time.