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.

I reached out to the campus life coordinator and learned that the peer mentorship program offered by school has a low application rate (mentor) but an overwhelming amount of mentees. The mentorship program also requires time for training and reporting which can be a big commitment for the mentor.

I also conducted in-depth interviews with 3 upper-year students and 3 first-year students to gather key insights, and label some of the key quotes captured in the interview based on “feeling“ and “fact“ to identify what their emotional need and how might we improve the situation.

View interview script

Key Questions

I cluster similar ideas to identify pain points for mentor and mentee, and then create this chart to match those points in order to uncover the real problem and explore potential touchpoints.

After identifying the key problems, I look into the user journey to state what users need at each step and brainstorm some potential solutions. I decided to focus on 3 major user flows:

Onboarding, Become a mentor and Explore journeys,

because these are the stage that can be improved to significantly improve the mentorship journey.

I started some quick sketch which allows me decide the states I need to include in the journey, and after a couple of iterations, I moved to Sketch and created some wireframes.

I choose to start from the major screen (match recommendation) as this is where users will spend most of their time. Wireframes allow me to see my idea in a more refined format and gather feedback from other people.

Due to time limitations, I haven’t conducted any user testing, but I believe this is an important part of the design and can help to validate my assumptions.

I think school plays an important part in the mentorship development, and it should offer more tangible incentive to upper-year students to reinforce this positive circle.

I choose this exercise because it connects with me. When I first started university, I constantly doubted if this is the right program, if art school is for me. I can still remember the summer before university I reached out to about 10 people via school app and hope to learn more about university life, but only got 2 replies.

Coincidentally, last year I was approached by a girl who lets me see myself 3 years ago: a bit anxiety, not sure about the future, and have so many goals but don’t know how to prioritize. I am willing to mentor her but have my hand full with projects, work, and interviews, so we decided to develop this online mentorship and it works out very well, which also inspires me to design this experience.

As a designer, my interest is not limited in UX/UI design, but motion graphics, illustration, and research. As an empathetic person, I hope my design could make positive impacts on people’s life.