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Team Members
Amaar F, Billal Q, Janna C, Jian Z, Seemin S.
Client
Innovation Hub at the University of Toronto
My Role
User Research, Prototyping, wireframing, usability testing
Tools
Figma, Balsamiq, Usabilityhub.com
Overview
Problem
How can we help students leverage mentorship to prepare for their next steps beyond graduation?
Solution
To provide students with personalized advice and guidance from an experienced professional.
Outcome
A mobile application that allows students to connect with highly curated mentors. This application would cater to the education & professional networking industry.
User Research (Studio Lead)
Studio Lead
As studio lead I had additional responsibilities such as coming up with a list of tasks ahead of team working sessions and adding them on Trello, setting and sending meeting agendas, polls, and invites for extra meeting time, conflict resolver, ensuring people are on task, managing Trello, final review of the documents, and submission of the documents.
Goal
We wanted to understand the problem space better by learning about students' behaviours, attitudes, and pain points regarding career-specific mentorship.
Interviews & Questionaire
I conducted two 1:1 interviews with participants that matched our inclusion criteria - full-time graduate or undergraduate UofT students - and fielded the questionnaire on Reddit, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. I also created posters to help attract participants.
Other team members were conducting interviews and fielded the questionnaire as well.
10
Interviews
15
Questionnaire Responses
Analysis (Studio Lead)
Studio Lead
As studio lead I had additional responsibilities such as coming up with a list of tasks ahead of team working sessions and adding them on Trello, setting and sending meeting agendas, polls, and invites for extra meeting time, conflict resolver, ensuring people are on task, managing Trello, final review of the documents, and submission of the documents.
Affinity Map
During our studio, we put our data on an affinity map (digitally on Figjam) and created labels for the clusters.
Artifact building
After getting a better understanding of our users, we needed to build artifacts to keep users at the forefront of our design process.
Content-Heavy Persona
'Connie The Confused' represents our collective quantitative and qualitative data gathered during the research process. I created the persona, sent it to the team, and made any changes based on their feedback.
Connie was now our primary focus in this stage of the design process.
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Polished Persona
The aesthetically pleasing and concise persona helps team members stay focused on important details of our primary users.
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Empathy Map
We put our data on an empathy map to see what Connie says, thinks, does, and feels.
I helped create some of the points in the empathy map. The team edited and polished the map for the finished artifact.
After the team combined all of our quantitative and qualitative data together and analyzed it, we were left with 3 main results
Result 1
Students look for career advice online - and have mixed satisfaction with what they find
Result 2
Students are worried about ‘breaking into’ their chosen field
Result 3
Students are worried if they are truly prepared to work in their chosen field
Ideation
Needs Statement
We focused on the three main needs of Connies. I created the three needs statements, sent them to the team, and made any changes to the statements based on their feedback.
Need 1
Connie needs a way to get personalized advice about her career dilemma so that she can feel confident with her career choice.
Need 2
Connie needs a way to confidently connect with a network of working professionals that understand her unconventional path so that she can feel less anxious about life after graduation.
Need 3
Connie needs a way to understand what skills she has and how those skills are applicable to her desired career path so that she is aware of her strengths and weaknesses when job hunting.
Big Ideas
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Voting and Prioritization Grid
We clustered our big ideas and voted based on feasibility and impact. We had a winner.
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Prototype
What is MatchMentor?
‘MatchMentor’ allows mentees (such as Connie) to identify mentors (working professionals) they believe can best help using their unique personal and professional experiences.
2 main features
Mentor Search
Mentor search and curation is our application’s ability to take the inputs and specifics of the mentee, in order to match them with a mentor best suited to help them achieve their career goals.
Mentor Chat
First impressions matter. The mentor chat feature allows pre-filled first-contact messages mentees can use in order to connect with their selected mentors, taking the guesswork out of what to say.
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Hills
Hills are statements of intent written as meaningful user outcomes.
We chose three specific scenarios to focus on, all of which relate back to Connie. In all three cases, the 'who' was a graduating student which is similar to Connie.
Mid-Fidelity Prototype
After we did the lean evaluation of the low-fidelity storyboards, I started designing the mid-fidelity prototype on Figma. I sent the final product to the team, made changes based on their feedback, and helped another team member with implementing changes to the post-heuristic mid-fidelity prototype.
Evaluation
Three Evaluations
We conducted three evaluations on our prototype - a heuristic Evaluation, an unmoderated first click test, & a scripted Think Aloud
I helped make edits and design changes to the heuristic evaluation in Figma and conducted one scripted Think Aloud interview.
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Heuristic Evaluation
The overall layout, flow, and design of the post-heuristic evaluation remained the same. There were some changes implemented to make the user flow clearer and more consistent.
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Unmoderated Click Test
We gained valuable insights from the click test. Overall, it was not a successful test for us. We need to make the tasks clearer and easy to navigate for users.
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Scripted Think-Aloud
Users were confused and at times did not know what to do. Similar to the click test, we need to make changes to our prototype based on their feedback. An example of one recommendation is located on the right side.
Next Steps