Google Design Exercise - Mentorship Connection
Prompt
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. Design an experience where prospective mentors and mentees can be matched, based on similar interests, location, and availability. Show your process and how you arrived at your solution. Please include a sequence of high-fidelity mocks from your design solution.
Understand
I conducted three in-person interviews with potential mentees and one potential mentor. trying to understand our users, their needs, and the unique context in which they live. In addition, I browsed some articles about mentorship connection. Based on my research, I summarized the user's pain points and questions.
Mentor
Questions
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Can I clearly be helpful to this potential mentee? Have they reached out with clear reasons or intentions for why they’d like my help?
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Is this person prepared? Do they tend to be proactive about setting up time and providing enough context or an agenda upfront?
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Can this person be completely open and honest? Are they willing to provide deep context about their problems and vulnerabilities?
Questions
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Can this person give actionable advice? Have they told you something in the past that you’ve been able to apply right away? Are they a good teacher?
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Does this person seem present and focused? Do they give you or others their full attention when they’re in listening mode? Or are they looking at their phone? Do they interrupt?
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Does this potential mentor remember key details about me? Have you had to continuously repeat yourself or remind them about who you are or the context of your job every time you see them?
Mentee
Define
Method: Synthesis
To make sense of my research findings, I aggregated them and recognized their patterns and relationships. It enables me to define the challenge(s) and identify opportunities for innovation.
Insights
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Prepare some questions before meeting make mentee appear and feel prepared — and set strong expectations. It might also disqualify suboptimal candidates who won’t make the investment mentors are looking for.
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Mentees always need multiple mentors. It’s important to have a number of perspectives to bring to bear on the biggest challenges their face.
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Some variables are very important for mentors and mentees in mentorship connection. They are time commitment, formality, experience gap, location and desired knowledge.
Create
Ideation
After I generated some insights, I started to reframe insights in a way that makes them more generative. I wrote these opportunity areas as How Might We...? statements. Then I generated ideas in a short span of time.
How Might We encourage mentees to be prepared for meeting with mentors?
How Might We allow mentees to explore various mentorship programs?
How Might We allow mentors to qualify the mentorship applications?
Assumption
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All mentorship programs are for free.
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The product only provides small to medium size (no more than 50 mentees) mentorship programs.
Mentorship Connection Experience
Wireframes
High-Fidelity Prototypes
As a mentee, how do I match a mentor?
1. From rough search to precise filtering
Based on my research, potential mentees prefer to browse lots of mentorship opportunities at the beginning and then figure out what they are truly looking for. Based on that, I designed the start screen, which enables user to search roughly or just start exploring. On the exploring page, I designed the filtering system which allows users to find mentors precisely.
2. Why explore mentorship programs, not mentors?
Interviewees complained that it takes time and energy to learn about every mentor and decide. The mentorship program with a specific topic is a more straightforward way to match mentors. When users go to the detail page, it will show more information about mentors. Users can also search specific mentors on the search bar.
1.Search
2.Explore
3. Filter
What kind of variables should be in the on-boarding/filter design to create more fruitful mentoring relationships?
From my secondary research, I found that there are five important variables to determine mentoring relationships. They are time commitment, formality, location, experience gap and desired knowledge. I included these variables into filter, on-boarding and mentor details page.
Filter
On-boarding
As a mentor, how do I match a mentee?
Why/How I design a two-way selection between mentors and mentees?
I'd like to design an experience encouraging mentees to be prepared for meeting with mentors. In addition, mentors are able to disqualify suboptimal candidates who won’t make the investment mentors are looking for.
Mentors are encouraged to set personalized questions for applicants. When mentees are applying for the mentorship program, they need to answer these questions. And the mentor will look at their answers to decide who can attend the meeting.
Detail
Mentees answer questions
Request to attend
Mentors view applicants' answers
User Testing
I conducted user testings with two people. One is a Ph.D. student in computer science and the other one is a software engineer with 4 years experience. Here are some of their feedback.
Before
Now
Users are confused about "Tell Mentor Your Interest" button.
They asked me: why you put the button at the right side of the "Attend" button. So I changed it to a text link:"Not interested? Tell mentor what you want".
Before
There is no confirm button for check options
One tester said mentor should not be able to disqualify mentees if mentees have been already qualified. So I added a confirm button, in case users did a wrong action and were unable to change.
Now
What I learned from the design exercise
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The first thing I learned is time management. Since the design challenge is a one-week exercise, as a student with part-time jobs, I need to manage my time well and do the exercise efficiently. I am happy that I did it!
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The process to understand the difference between mentors and mentees was inspiring. When a mentee is looking for a mentor, he is most likely to explore lots of opportunities. However, for mentors, they prefer a more personalized process.
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I learned how to prototype my ideas rapidly. I applied the knowledge I learned from the rapid prototyping class to this design exercise. Finally, I succeeded in finishing designing my prototypes in six hours.
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Through user testing, I learned that testers will help you thinking about your products from a different perspective.