Hornsment

Mobile UX design for Google Design Challenge

This project was my response to the individual design challenge I received from Google for the UX Summer Internship 2020. Few weeks after my submission, Google canceled their UX internship program due to the COVID-19.

Challenge Prompt

Your school wants to strengthen the community by encouraging experienced students to connect with new students and help them adjust to campus life. Design an experience that allows mentors and mentees to discover each other. Consider the needs of both mentors and mentees, including how someone may become a mentor and how to connect mentors to mentees.
 

 

Overview

Type 

Individual Project​

Skills employed 

User Research, Journey Mapping, Wireframing, User Testing, Prototyping

Tools

 Figma

Duration

 1 Week (14 hrs/day)

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Objective

This project presents a solution to help students find mentors for their needs and facilitates the communication between mentors and mentee at UT Austin campus.

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Approach

This project started with generative and secondary research. I talked to 5 students about their experience of being a mentor and/or mentee in the campus and also explored existing organizations and models that are serving students. After that I found the main pain points that the solution must address.

Some of the underlying ideas in this project are :

  • Intelligent categorization of students based on their interests and social life 

  • Proposing a suggestion system that helps students find the right mentor for their specific needs

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Setting interests

Linking to social media

Onboarding

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Receiving a message for help

Setting reminder for later review

Accepting and sharing contacts

Mentor Experience

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Writing the Request

Selecting the mentor

sending request

Start communication

Mentee Experience

 
 

Design Process

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Initiation

Brainstorming

I started working on the project by brainstorming for generating questions that might help me discover major characteristics of the challenge.

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Key Takeaways

Basic takeaways from the initial brainstorming practice were:

  • ​The flow that shows how a mentor-mentee interaction

  • Questions that help me identify users' needs

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Research

 I prepared my questions for mentors and mentees as an output of brainstorming process:  

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Key Findings

Talking to 5 users whom 2 of them have had experience of being a mentor and all 5 had been a mentee sometime in the past.

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Secondary Research

I researched the existing mechanisms at UT Austin for mentor-mentee relationships.

Sanger Learning Center is the largest and the most recognized one. Therefore, I decided to go there and take a look at the center and if possible talk to the administrators (as a potential 3rd user group) to see what their needs are and how their experience is using the current system. I did so and found out that the University considers clear boundries for academic and non-academic services that can offer to students.

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Second Round User Research

I talked to 4 students about their experience of having or being a mentor specifically for non-academic purposes. Key findings are: 

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Persona and Journey Map

After defining personas I turned all the findings into journey+empathy maps for mentees and mentors

Community interaction Models

I identified two models of community interactions that provide the context for communication and might generate a mentor-mentee relationship:

Centralized Model

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Decentralized Model

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Design

For a solution to provide the user with a good experience, it must have the following characteristics: