Project overview
About the project
Problem: Mentorship is proven to help retain employees and foster positive working environment. However, the current mentorship programs are flawed as most programs face lack of mentors and scaling problem.
Solution: The solution proposed is a mobile app which serves as a facilitator in the mentorship process. The platform is designed with a system to convert experienced mentees to become a mentor. Hence, maintaining great balance of mentee and mentor ratio on the system.
Timeline: This is an 8 months long project as my individual thesis project at The School of Visual Arts MFA Interaction Design Program. Instructed by Eric Forman and advised by Shalin Pei at Facebook.
My role: My role in this project focused on research, synthesizing, prototyping, UI design and final solution deliverable.
The challenge
Make Mentorship More Approachable & Accessible
Identifying the lack of mentor problems and create a platform to facilitate better mentorship experience that aimed to recruit and retain members.
The process
the solution
Design Details
The platform is designed to convert experienced mentee to become potential mentor to solve the lack of mentors problem.
Approachable to be a mentor
Instead of making the user to choose to be a mentor or a mentee (or users that don't want to be both), using the action that users is looking for "I need help" or "I can help" is more straight-forward.
Feel connected with personal info
From my research, mentees find existing platform does not provide enough personal information for them to choose which one is the right fit for them. Showing a short bio, social media or portfolio link could be helpful to make decision.
More control on mentee to build relationships
After the first meeting, both sides will be prompted to know how the conversation goes. Having more control over the mentee could help to maintain the relationship, as they should be the one that is proactive in reaching for help.
Encourage experience mentee to become a potential mentor
At the end session feedback, a mentor can recommend their mentee to offer help in areas that they think they are good at. If the mentee accumulates enough recommendations, they will be notified. This is a way to validate their ability to help others.
Another way to recruit mentors or get mentorship by Q&As
The community section provides different options in topics and time commitment for users to contribute to the platform, including Q&A or events.
conclusion
Next step
Because of the time limitation, I focused on the experience of employees and the conversion strategy. In the future, I would like to understand how an organization (HR department) will use this platform to track employees performance and get insights on providing the right resources for creating a better working experience.
My learning
I am excited to work on a problem that I care about. I had a great experience collaborating with my advisor who has a great understanding of the problem in mentorship programs. I learned that it is better to focus on one problem and design the solution in solving that one problem. If there is a problem that involved a lot of stakeholders, it is important to understand the problem from a systemic perspective.
Thank you for reading.
This project will be presenting at the SVA IXD Thesis Festival as an opening project.