MENTORSHIP PAIRING APP DESIGN(FEB 2020)

As last year's co-chair of the Design Students' Association (DSA) at my school, I was in charge of overseeing the mentorship process between first-year and upper-year students. I was also a mentee myself in my freshman year, and became a mentor the following year. DSA's existing mentorship system involved pairing students manually by reviewing each application, so I had the opportunity to see issues between mentees and mentors first-hand.

Below is DSA's current mentorship pairing process:

of mentors found that their mentees had asked repeated questions from before, so they would have to re-explain some concepts to their mentee.

User Research
I created two user personas to create two distinct user archetypes for the mentee and the mentor.

Understanding Both Perspectives
With the feedback given and looking at my own past experiences as a mentee/mentor, I considered the problems of both sides, mentor and mentee, and the problems they shared.

Market Research
I started to look into external applications with similar goals as mine to gain a better understanding of the target market and what pain points I can resolve.

I extracted each problem the mentor or mentee was facing, and looked at them individually. I find mindmapping the best way to lay out potential resolutions, along with any pros/cons they could face. After up with various solutions, I narrowed down the options and highlighted some of the approaches I wanted to take.

I started from drawing board and started visualizing the resolutions I came up with in the previous phase. These are some of my (very) loose sketches.

User-specific flows
I began to organize the frames into mid-fidelity wireframes, where I outlined the beginning points, main screens, and the end points of each user's journey throughout the application. See below.

I opted for a clean, friendly look to hopefully minimize the anxiety first-years feel when transitioning to campus life and requesting help from mentors. I used complementing to distinguish the mentor's interface from the mentee's – blue for mentors and orange for mentees. To add to the modern, friendly visuals, all shapes, lines and text are curved or rounded.

I created some illustrations to enhance the overall friendliness of the application.

With a general infrastructure established, I proceeded to prototype and organize content. For the design, I considered the mentee's need for approachable and helpful mentorship sessions, as well as the mentor's need for efficient scheduling.

University Login
Users login using their University email address, which syncs their basic information (name, gender, etc).

Mentoring Topics
Users set the design topics they want to be mentored in – which can also be changed later in their profile settings.

Hobbies + Interests
An important part of the matching process looks at personality compatibility, so users are matched with someone they feel more comfortable talking to.

More Approachable Mentoring,
Less Intimidation
Mentors can also include some of their own hobbies and interests to increase compatibility with mentees. This way, mentees feel less intimidated if they are paired with someone they can relate to.

Set Availability
The mentor's availability is also set on the Onboarding phase.
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Personalized Profile
Mentors and mentees each have their own profile cards detailing the topics they can mentor or need mentorship on. On the back of mentor profiles, their up-to-date availabilities are listed.

YSDN-Specific Mentors
Mentees get recommended mentors based on their onboarding selection. All mentors are upper year YSDN students who can help with school-specific issues. Mentees can view each mentor profile and choose their own mentors, curating their own learning experience.

Mentee Requests
‍Mentees send mentors their problem through a message request. The mentor can view the problem before accepting the request, and send their availabilities for a mentorship session. Once the time slot is selected, it gets added to their schedules.

Record Video Sessions
From user research it was found that mentees often re-ask the same questions from previous sessions. I added a feature where users can record the session so they can refer back to it.
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Keeps Track of Session Times
Due to the issue of mentors being constantly contacted when busy, the app only allows video sessions to begin once it comes to the scheduled session time.

Rating System
A rating system not only helps mentees in their mentor search, but also gives the mentor motivation to continue to deliver high quality guidance.

Overview + Edit
Both mentors and mentees can view or edit their upcoming sessions in a visual calendar format. Mentors can also adjust their upcoming availabilities.

For Open-Ended Questions
From my findings I also found that there are certain questions mentees have that their assigned mentor can't necessarily answer, such as Thoughts on internships in New York? So, I provided an open forum where students can ask a wider audience and users can suggest other mentors to help guide them.

General Tips + Resources
Along with the issue of repeated questions, mentors may find a common problem among many of their mentees. The app lets mentors post helpful tips or resources to reach all their mentees at once – making things more efficient.