DawgLife
Google Design Challenge Project
As the current year is more than halfway done alongside High School students beginning to sign up for orientation, the UW committee is looking to me to design an experience that allows mentors and mentees to discover each other.
Presentation Slides Link
Overview
Role
Timeframe
Product Designer
1 Week
Team
Tools
Jose Santos
Figma, InVision,
Problem Statement
Being a current student at the University of Washington, I’ve gathered insight that most students feel generally dissatisfied with current UW first-year/mentorship programs because of the (1) lack of initial transparency between prospected mentees and mentors along with (2) mentor decisions being weighed significantly more than mentees in the pairing process.
Research
Current Experience
Before formulating a solution, I conducted research to better understand the current situation of mentorship findings, experiences, and first-year programs (FYP) here at UW.
I constructed research questions about the current experience and from there, I discovered two key underlying pain points UW students are currently facing through background research and contextual inquiry.
Competitive Analysis
In order to better understand the needs of our audience along with their current available options, we looked further into current popular resources on the market and analyzed their strengths and weaknesses.
Furthermore, we comprehensively brainstormed what be believe would offer users more control and reliability along with how we can effectively introduce those concepts in our design.
Pain Points
User Research
With 24 survey replies and 2 interview participants (1 upper & 1 lower class), it helped me lay a foundation for my ideation and design purposes
User Personas
Key Takeaways:
Incoming students wish to have outlets of information on programs, organizations, and activities
Experienced students are worried about choosing the wrong mentee to pair with
Design Prototyping
Wireframes
I focused on the solution knowing in mind that I’m in a limited timeframe. I wanted to focus solely on the issues presented and a simple yet, effective way of creating a solution that is quickly comprehensible for users to understand.
User Flow + Lo-Fi Designs
Based on the above feedback and needs, we first designed and laid out our application design with the idea of being an add on feature for google maps.
User Testing
I conducted usability tests with 4 participants. Respectively, I tested each participant with the following tasks.
Test 1
You want to sign up as a mentor or mentee, how do you go about it?
Insight
2 out of 4 people I tested had similar confusion: “What if I want to be a mentor, will the same questions be applied to a mentee? I want to be able to showcase my experience as a mentor.”
Iternation
With the same questionnaire applied to both mentors and mentees, users found it suitable to have both forms tailored for each role.
As a result of this test, I implemented questions that effectively showcase the skills, background, and experiences of both mentor and mentee.
Test 2
You want to join a program based on your answers, how do you go about it?
Insight
2 out of 4 people I tested had similar confusion: “What if I want to hear about personal experiences from other students before applying?”
Iternation
I intended to link the program website initially through the “Apply Now” button.
As a result of this test, I implemented an “Ask” feature allowing the user to instantly contact individuals who’ve done these programs, thus providing further insight to users.
Test 3
You want to sign up and see who you could reach out to, what would you do?
Insight
3 of my 4 testers had the same following confusion: “What if I’m a mentor and I want both mentors and mentees? Even if I’m a mentor I would like to follow up with other mentors for tips/guidance.”
Iternation
To allow full freedom to the user in looking for guidance, I implemented further results to include BOTH mentees/mentors for any users. So that menees can meet with mentees and so forth for mentors.
Hi-Fi Design
Style Guide
Reflection
If I had more time, I would research the interaction of groups of mentors and mentees. Some testers believed that if groups were formed it can provide a smaller community for users to feel more comfortable and behave more actively in.
I believe that adding cohorts of mentors with mentees for a period of time would influence more activity and mentor retention and engagement among the student community.