ZIYI HUANG
MENTORMMUNITY
Mentorship Management Tool
OVERVIEW
Timeline
Feb to April 2022
Team
Ziyi Huang, Nancy Wu, Lesi Yang, Xinmeng Wang Jiahao Wu
Project Nature
UWaterloo MDEI Student Project
Role
Ideation, Research, User Testing, User Experience, Prototyping
PROBLEM
Design Prompt
Design a tool for school districts to ensure that everyone has access to mentorship
How can school board provide every student with effective mentorship efficiently?
Problem Overview
Product: a management tool to manage mentorship programs
Target User: school district staff
Goal: to ensure that every student has access to mentorship.
PROCESS
01 Emphathize
Learn about user
User Research
Empathy maps
User Journey Maps
04 Prototype
Simulate experience
Wireframes
Mid fidelity prototype
02 Define
Determine problem
Story board
Affinity mapping
Competitive audit
05 Test
Validate with users
Alpha testing
Usability testings
03 Ideate
Define solution
Brainstorm
User flows
Information architecture
06 Launch
Present and feedback
Visual design
High fidelity prototype
Present and gather feedback
Emphathize
User Research
We conducted a secondary research to understand the process of mentor management and discover problems that the current process have and understand users’ expectations of the tool. Then we organised data through affinity mapping.
Research questions:
How do you manage mentorship program now?
How do you measure the success of a mentorship program?
How do you match the mentors and mentees?
How is your experience with the current mentorship management tool? What are the pros and cons?
What is your expectations for the mentorship management tool?
Insights
Define
Competitive Audit
We analysed 4 mentorship management products from different perspectives: Security, Learnability, Functionality and UX Design.
We then compared their functions and concluded their strengths and weaknesses. We found that a successful mentor management tool needs the following four functions including recruiting, mentors and mentees management, matching system, and data analytics.
Ideate
Define Solution
Match mentors & mentees easily
Match mentors, mentees and peers easily with smart mentor matching algorithm
Manage mentorship programs efficiently
Eliminate management work on excel spreadsheets with all in one management system
Provide high quality trainings
Provide quality trainings efficiently based on mentors’ needs and track performance
Analytics and reports
Gain data and analytics for mentorship programs
User Journey Map
We created a user journey map to uncover moments of both frustration and delight throughout the process. We identified opportunities to address customers’ pain points, and alleviate fragmentation.
Prototype & Test
Usability Testing
Participants
2 rounds of testing
5 participants per round
Research Methods
Moderated Usability Test
10 tasks
Data Collection
Screen recording on Zoom & Microsoft Teams
Iterations
We made wireframes and prototypes to receive feedback and iterate. We refined design details to achieve the vision and goals with 3 major improvements:
Highlight “Match” button
“I couldn’t find how I can match a mentee after I clicked the Match tab.”
No "Match" button. Users can only match after clicking "Edit".
Highlighted "Match" button. Users can easily perform tasks.
No "Match" button. Users can only match after clicking "Edit".
Use right terminologies
“I wasn’t able to tell the difference between "Screen" and "Recruit".
No caption explaining the difference between "Screen" and "Recruit".
Captions explaining both terms "Recruit" and "Screen".
No caption explaining the difference between "Screen" and "Recruit".
Provide feedback after task
“I don't know if I match successfully or not because I did not get any feedback."
No feedback after changing matching algorithm.
Pop up feedback after changing matching algorithm.
No feedback after changing matching algorithm.
Launch
Final Design
Offload the administrative workload
of mentoring programs
-
Eliminate management work on excel spreadsheets with all in one management system
-
Mentor mentee matching algorithm with smart suggestions
-
Collect mentor and mentee profiles and manage meetings on a clean dashboard.
Gain visibility into
mentorship program analytics
-
Provide analytics, surveys and insights into mentorship program progress.
Track mentor-mentee progress and review feedback. -
Show ROI, program outcomes and reports
Train on mentorship and soft skills effectively
-
Easy access to quality trainings
-
Provide engaging trainings with rich media, including articles, videos, and slideshows
-
Provide trainings based on mentors’ needs and track performance
Figma Prototype
Reflection
Next Steps
How might we achieve matching efficiency by simplifying the matching process?
How might we design a better UX based on user preferences?
How might we make users feel that their information is safe and secure?
Challenge
Due to the pandemic, we were not able to conduct user research with school district staff as a graduate study project. Therefore, we conduct secondary research to understand the needs and pain points instead.
Lesson Learned
- Teamwork
This project taught us that designing a solution from scratch is not an easy task. It required the team to conduct extensive research, discussion, and repeated attempts to work towards the same goal. We also learn how to focus on building empathy for our target audience, conducting usability tests, and creating problem statements.
- Project scope
At first we found the prompt to broad and started to list out all possible functions to the tool. However, we found ourselves overwhelmed and lost. We later focused on understanding the pain points and focused on the top three. In this way we were able to develop a solution that truly helps the users.
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