Mentor Connection

Mentoring can be a great way to share knowledge and help someone 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 — process and how you arrived at your solution.

"How might we create an experience where mentors and mentees can be matched based on their preferences."

 Role:

• Product strategy.

• User research & Analysis.

• Persona creation.

• Wireframes.

• UI Design & Prototyping.

Timeline: 7 days

Tools and Resources: Sketch and Invision.

Users Interviews

At the discovery phase of my project, I conducted user interviews to get a better understanding of the problem. I was fortunate to interview industry leaders and also had an opportunity to attend a survey which gave us a broad perspective of the problem.

Some of the things which we were interested in knowing were what were some of the channels through which mentees connect with the mentors. Also, I wanted to know what were some of the barriers which mentors have while mentoring.

Some of the insights from the user interviews were:

1. Users have difficulties while looking for mentors in their particular field.
2. One of the significant problems which the mentees face is lack of availability for mentors to help them with their needs.
3. Mentors get bombarded with many questions from the recent graduates, and due to their busy schedule, they are not able to help them.
4. According to one of the user interviews with Mentors, I received feedback that they are usually free on the weekends and can give around 2-3 hours for mentoring and helping with queries.
5. After having a user interview with one of the mentor, I learned that there's should be an option of providing availability slots for mentors. It would give flexibility to both mentees and mentors.

Surveys

Example

After I conducted user interviews with the mentors and mentees. We set up an online survey and asked them to fill it out. Here is the link to the survey Link.

The survey ran for 3 days and I was fortunate to receive feedback from around 10 people.

Some of the keys findings from the survey are listed below.

Design Impact 

What am I designing?

An experience where mentors can help mentees according to their availability and want to help mentees with the same problem.

Who is this for?

This is for mentors who are looking to help mentees and want to help them whenever they have time.

Where and when is this going to be used?

It can be used by mentors online using the mobile app and whenever they have a stable internet connection.

Why is this important?

Mentees have a lot of issues, and they are finding it difficult to get their doubts/questions answered by experts in their fields.

Mentors, on the other hand, have very less time on their hand and receive requests from 100's of mentors asking the same questions and their 

Focussing primarily on the interactional context of each persona helped me to understand the emotional state of the user at the moment of the interaction. This process has significantly influenced the development of important design decisions and critical functionalities. Some examples are as follows:

Mentors don't have more than 4 hrs for mentorship.

Mentors get approached by mentees who have the same issue, and they have to repeat them with the same solutions. A lot of mentees have the same problems.

Mentors usually want to provide remote mentorship, and there should be an option for the same.

Customer Journey

To know our users' behavior better, we created a Customer Journey Map. Customer Journey Map helped us to get to know more about the frustrations and usual patterns while finding a mentor in their industry.

What have you learned from this project?

Explain what you had learned, experienced, or simply how you felt during the project. 

• Research is a must: – I couldn’t have designed the product without the help of the people who are actually facing the issue. The user survey revealed unexpected information and made it possible to adapt the product to users’ needs.
  
  
• Personas are powerful: – Being aware of users’ needs and pain points helped me to create a seamless, end-to-end experience.
  
  
• The user is always right: – Conducting user interviews and evaluating users feedback at various stages helped me to discover and eliminate pain point.