Creating a program to bridge the gap between students and potential mentors

I reached out to a marketing organization I was a part of for 3 years during my undergrad to help them design and launch their marketing mentorship program.

The Laurier Marketing Association (LMA) strives to support the marketing interests of Laurier undergraduate students by providing several opportunities for industry professionals and Laurier's top marketing talent to network and connect with each other.

Rapidly brainstorming "how might we" statements

To get all our ideas on the table, we created a brainstorm affinity map and organized the questions and possible solutions by user group and the process. This allowed us to identify potential opportunity spaces to guide and focus our primary research goals.

Competitive analysis

I began by doing some research to see what’s out there currently. I conducted a competitor analysis of career mentorship programs at our university and other university career mentorship programs, taking note of features and reassessing these programs. The following were my key takeaways:

To further our research we used both qualitative and quantitative methods, such as online interviews and surveys, to determine underlying patterns, wants, needs, and opportunities. We conducted a quick survey questionnaire with 70 students (business, marketing, and communications backgrounds), alumni, and marketing professionals to identify the needs/pain points of prosperous mentors and mentees.

Underlying problem

After conducting our research we discovered an underlying problem:

So why are experienced alumni and upper-year students under utilized as mentors?

There were several pain points that I discovered during our primary research:

Defining our user

After synthesizing my research, I created two personas of our main intended audience for the mentorship experience we were designing. I developed the personas by combining characteristics of those surveyed and interviewed, as well as patterns that led me to my key research findings earlier.

After understanding our research findings and defining our users we settled on a mission statement and key goals that would solve the problem.

The mentee experience

I created a user journey map of the mentee process as a tool for ideation. Running through this exercise helped me empathize with inexperienced students and develop potential solutions to satisfy their needs and outline potential gaps of opportunities. Based on our earlier research findings, students preferred using a website due to its convenience and being easily accessible with pre-existing channels of communication.

We decided to focus our design on three main components of the experience which address the main problem of discovering and connecting with industry experienced mentors. Therefore our design solution is focused on the homepage, onboarding, and dashboards.

Defining design elements and visual hierarchy

After a few rounds of sketching iterations, we moved my sketches into mid-fidelity wireframes. During this stage, my goal was to keep things simple and not overcomplicate the experience for the user. I ensured that my wireframes proposed possible solutions that best matched the design goals I set previously. After several interactions, the following is the final result of my user flow for the mentees and mentors.

Making improvements by identifying usability problems

We used a mid-fidelity prototype to conduct online moderated user tests. The tests were on our core target users which included 5 students and 4 industry-experienced individuals. By observing how they behaved we were able to create a much more effective experience for the intended audience.

After conducting the tests we came up with the following usability iterations:

After outlining the standard style elements I created high fidelity prototypes to address the project goals.