Mentor Connection
January 27, 2020
The following case study is a hypothetical assignment that provides an overview of my design process while creating a mentoring platform based on skills, interests and availability. The case study was completed in 15 hours.
Brief
Design an experience where prospective mentors and mentees can be matched, based on similar interests, location, and availability.
Mentoring can be a great way to share knowledge and help someone be successful in their personal or professional life. But many potential mentors are often too busy to commit to regular meetings, or they have a hard time connecting with people seeking help.
Solution
Shoshin is a symbiotic mentorship platform that facilitates professional growth. Members can not only benefit from other member’s experience, they are also empowered to influence the growth of others.
Process
My design process is a derivative of the double diamond design model invented by the London Design Council.
Tools
Pen and paper, Google Forms for data gathering, Invision for interactive mocks, Sketch for wireframe and prototypes.
Understanding the problem
Mentorship can play a significant role in shaping personal and professional life. “How might we help people connect and forge meaningful, lasting relationships?” I approached the brief by first penning down my thoughts at a high level These included questions, assumptions, hypothesis and even a few ideas.
Research
Secondary research
Diving through internet, I found a statistical study on mentorship in the technical industry. Few key problems identified in Emma’s study were:
Over 90% people find it hard to initiate conversations seeking mentorship.
70% Fortune 500 companies have some sort of formal or informal mentoring program. This has enabled employees to continue to grow in their career path and helps the company retain them. However, not all of them are as successful as their organizers would hope for.
46% women do not have access to leadership to support their career.
Primary Research
Using quantitative and qualitative data helps debunk myths and understand member pain points. Thus ensuring the solution is designed for the right use cases. For this task, I conducted a survey with 20+ participants trying to learn their needs from mentorship platform.
Survey link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mlQqE1u1IgIPCWo6UWeZMqOeEBUNA6gyfkaxRhYv6dU/edit?usp=sharing
Few challenges that emerged from speaking to people who have either mentored or been mentored in the recent years include:
- It is difficult to find someone with the right skill-sets and mind set. I might be too skilled or not skilled enough for the person.
- I am unsure of where to find the right people to connect with.
- Finding a common time slot to connect. Everyone seems busy, I don’t want to impose.
- Communicating online vs offline, asynchronous vs real time.
Synthesis and Insights
During one of the interviews, my participant introduced me to the term ‘Shoshin’. Shoshin is a word from Zen Buddhism which translates to beginner’s mind. It refers to having an attitude of openness and eagerness to learn without preconceptions even when studying something at advanced level.
For the success of the solution it is important that all members feel that they can learn something, no matter where on the career ladder they are.
While the role of a mentor and a mentee are well defined and non fluid, it is important to realize that an individual can hold both roles that of a mentor and a mentee. While the person learns from one, they may mentor another.
Goal
Connect members of the community to like minded individuals that can help them grow in their professional lives.
- Connect individuals based on their skills and development areas.
- Build a quick and easy onboarding flow that validates/verifies member identities.
- Allow members to have control over their commitment to their mentors/mentees.
Guard rails
For the purpose of this assignment I built the following constraints to help me focus my design decisions.
- Platform: Mobile
- Design systems: Google’s Material Design
- Solution must follow accessibility guidelines
Userflow
Sketches and wireframing
The goal of these early sketches is to help me visualize the user interface and plan the flow for the app. The sketches were not very refined but made with the intent for getting early feedback from users.
After receiving sufficient feedback on the paper prototypes I switched to Sketch where it is easier to move elements around. Sketch wireframes gave me more control on the interactions and helped me plan my storyboard and narrative.
Glimpse into the wire-framing process
Feedback helped me rethink my understanding of community and suggested mentors.
Both paper and preliminary wireframe prototypes were tested with 5 people and the feedback was evaluated to test
- understanding of each feature
- time taken for completion of each task
- general feedback on what else can this platform help with
UI & branding
I tried different layouts and colour combinations to develop the visual styling for the app. I have used open source design libraries from Humaaans by Pablo Stanley and Google’s Material design to develop the final prototype.
Colour theme and font selection
Typography: Shoshin uses Roboto typeface
Accessibility
- Touch targets: 48 x 48dp minimum touch targets for all tappable fields.
- Clear and succinct UX copy to explain actions to members at every step.
- Easy to understand hierarchy of visible elements with colour contrasts according to accessibility guidelines (4:5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text).
- Error states and next best action available for screens.
Shoshin | Growing together
Prototype link: https://invis.io/58VQ1VIPUYR
Image: Personas used in the mocks
Onboarding
Image: Onboarding, playful graphics and one tap login to help members onboard easily
Suman wants to create her account on Shoshin. The platforms asks her to sign up via either her LinkedIn profile or her school/company id. This helps the platform verify her profile. Her onboarding requires her to complete 4 questions:
- Photo, name, role and company, location – imported from Li
- Student or a professional – radio buttons
- Skills you excel in – chips
- Development areas – chips
- About – text field
The questions help the platform match Suman to mentors of her preference. During the initial rounds of paper mock testing my onboarding flow was lengthy and time consuming and people did not want to invest that much time into it without knowing what the platform has to offer to them in return. I decided to keep the onboarding to most important information and let members update their profile later on in the app.
Community
The Community section focuses on showing Suman some on the preliminary mentors that the platform recommends for her. The page is divided into different sections that are treated with different visual styling based on the hierarchy. The cards are designed to easily scan information and allow members to make a first level decision if they are interested in the individual. The cards thereafter rely on matching the member with mentors based on their preferences such as interests, location, school, company etc. Research indicated that a lot of people found their mentors by reaching out people from their school, previous workplaces or skill groups that they are part of. These cards use follow on a similar hypothesis to find relevant matches. I also designed cards for events as some participants said that they met their mentors at networking events.
At the end of this page is an educational modal that lets her improve her matches by adding more details to her profile.
Member profile
Member profiles are a more detailed snapshot of the people on the platform. The page is divided into various sections, starting with the top card. It is easy for Suman to see Ashish’s qualification, skill sets, experience, mentoring style and recommendations. Suman will also see if she shares any connections with Ashish (in this case alma matter). I think this will help ease her conversation with the person and allow her to establish a connection.
To send Ashish a mentorship request, Suman sends him a message explaining what she needs advise on. The design has tips to introduce members for anyone who isn’t sure where or how to begin their conversation
Notifications
Ashish will get a push notification when Suman asks him for a becoming a mentor.
Other notifications include reminders for scheduled calls or in person meetings and recommendation requests.
Requests
Ashish can see Suman’s request in the Request section of the application.
This section is divided into 2 sections:
- Pending mentee requests that the member has received.
- Mentorship request queue sent by the member.
Mentor-Mentee requests are capped to 5 active relationships on the platform. This is to ensure that the communication is not spread too thin and people get value from their conversations.
Ashish will see the message that Suman wrote when seeking him out as a mentor in context to her profile. Ashish can then choose to accept or ignore this request. He also has an option to message Suman if he wants to ask her further questions before accepting her request.
Both mentors and mentees will see the active state of their connections on the platform when they are online.
Also, they can choose end their mentor-mentee relationship on the platform at any time by toggling the drop down button in the top card.
Messages
Mentors and mentees can communicate with each other through the messaging section of the application. Messaging is supported by multi media uploads such as photos, audio files, pdf etc. Messages also lets members schedule meetings, mute messages in case one is on a vacation or would like some downtime and report abusive content.
Me (Member Profile)
Success metrics
If this were a real platform, the following metrics would be valuable to evaluate its success:
- Number of people on the platform.
- Number of active users.
- Balanced ratio of mentors to mentees.
- Ease of task completion, low drop off rates.
- Number of messages, scheduled calls.
Other metrics to measure app success include low number of uninstalls, page load time and voice of members
Learnings & conclusions
- This design exercise has allowed me to showcase my approach to problem solving and product development.
- Working on this exercise solo was a new experience, and it has helped me appreciate the joys of teamwork, and collaboration a little better.
- The core value proposition for Shoshin is how allows a person to take on bot roles – Mentor/Mentee thus not only growing, but growing together.
Stretch Goal
The prototype focuses on mobile interface however the platform isn’t necessarily mobile only. The capabilities of the application can also be extended to desktop and watch interfaces.
The current solution is primarily focused on individuals who are trying to grow in their careers. However, given that over 70% of Fortune 500 companies have some sort of formal or informal mentoring programs, Shoshin can be a great B2B tool. A separate role for the admin/organiser of the program needs to added to it’s current mentor-mentee usecases.
Our current landscape for mentoring isn’t very inclusive to gender and races. Reports show that over 50% of women don’t find senior leadership support in their workplaces. The platform should ideally help to filter out these biases and provide equal opportunity to all members. One of the early solutions I thought of was to use alias names and digital avatars for all members to overcome the subconscious bias. However there are con to this idea as people are a lot more likely to be abusive behind an anonymous identity and therefore I did not pursue it further.
Shoshin can utilize several of Google’s in-house products to make this a complete ecosystem for its members. These include:
- Calendar: To check availability and schedule meetings
- Drive: to share documents for feedback
- Hangouts: for audio and video meetings
Hypothetical brief, January 2019
Tools: Sketch notes on paper, Figma, Google Form
Illustration credit: Pablo Stanley, Humaans
