.png)
.png)
MentorMe Mobile App
In this day an age, finding a job, more often than not, is all about having connections. Not to mention, job-seekers just entering the job market need a little guidance in navigating the inner workings of their chosen profession. These prospective job-seekers need a venue that lets them reach out to potential career mentors interested in advising the next generation of working professionals.
Timeline: 3 weeks
My Role: Lead UX Designer, team of 4
Scope: Focused on how a new user seeking a mentor would onboard and use the app for the first time.
Prospective job-seekers just entering the job market are often intimidated to approach a potential mentor for guidance, especially if they are new to the industry. Existing apps such as LinkedIn fail to facilitate connections between young people seeking guidance and potential mentors. How might we make users feel more comfortable reaching out to potential mentors so that they can receive career advice and guidance in their career path?
Dating apps not only provide a convenient way to connect with new people, but also set the expectation that everyone is on the platform for the same reason: to meet their potential match. We believe applying dating concepts to the search for career mentors will set a similar precedence, giving users more confidence to reach out.
MentorMe is a mobile app that puts a career-oriented spin on design concepts commonly found in dating apps to help young prospectives match with career mentors. We hypothesized that by utilizing the same design concepts found in dating apps, we break down the perceived barrier the discourages job seekers from reaching out to career mentors through other methods.
To get a better understanding of individuals’ experiences with career mentors and whether, we conducted an initial survey with a target audience of individuals between the ages of 19-35. We received 19 responses and found the following results.
.png)
.png)
Most individuals were interested in career mentorship, yet almost half of them never had one. which led to the question, what is preventing individuals from reaching out for mentorship, especially on platforms like LinkedIn, which are geared for networking in a professional capacity?
LinkedIn was quickly identified as our biggest competitor in the career networking and mentorship field. Using a SWOT analysis, we identified the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of LinkedIn.
We narrowed down the information into the following pros and cons about the LinkedIn platform to focus on while designing MentorMe.
PROS
- can view profiles of professionals in their same field.
- can apply for jobs.
- can network with many people.
- is widely used by companies and employers to vet and recruit job-seekers.
CONS
- users need to mutually connect with each other first before messaging is enabled.
- mentoring is NOT the purpose of the app, though it is possible.
- can’t always know from profile if someone is open to mentoring
Despite the versatility and wide usage of LinkedIn for job searches, the platform lacks the ability to easily message potential mentors with confidence and positive expectations. We realized that our app would be a perfect fit for that niche if we could solve the aforementioned issues we identified with LinkedIn.
To get a better insight to what was preventing individuals from connecting with potential mentors and what they hope to gain from the experience, we conducted several interviews. Some notable responses we received below.
- individuals feel intimidated cold messaging someone on LinkedIn, due to feeling awkward and fearing rejection.
- individuals want to find a mentor compatible with them and their values.
What kind of features would help individuals feel confident in reaching out to an ideal professional mentor?
After conducting our research, we were confident that utilizing the same design concepts found in dating apps, such as Tinder and Hinge, could remove the barrier that prevents users from reaching out to potential career mentors.
Much like on a dating profile, we needed to determine what information to gather for users to effectively evaluate potential mentors. After synthesizing our research and brainstorming results, we narrowed down the features we would focus on to the following:
.jpg)
This helped inform our decision to focus on a user flow that started with an onboarding process all the way to selecting and messaging a potential mentor. We wanted to be able to showcase the convenience of the app by demonstrating how a user can go from being a new user to connecting with a mentor is a few easy steps.
We ambitiously determined that we would design the process for a first time user, taking them from onboarding to finding and messing a mentor.
.png)
.png)
Each member of our team sketched and wireframed our own designs, followed by individual guerilla testing. Unlike dating, career mentorship is not necessarily a monogamous relationship. An individual can have more than one career mentor at a given time. As such, we needed to adjust the dating app design concept to streamline how users browse through the mentor profiles. we concluded that the resulting features needed to be included in the design:
1. Switch from browsing individual profiles to viewing a list of potential profiles for easy scanning.
2. Able to save potential mentors to a list and send them a message at a later time.
My wireframes shown below eventually served as the foundation for the browsing and messaging portion of our final prototype:
.png)
Before finalizing our design, we each guerilla tested our own wireframes to learn about the friction points and to determine how intuitive the navigation was. Testing was conducted under the assumption that users are familiar enough with dating app concepts to apply the same behaviors to our app. Despite each of our team members testing our own designs, we all came to the same conclusion:
1. Switching between list and profile view using a bar or toggle on the “For You” page was not intuitive.
2. Navigation for users.buttons to “favorite” and dismiss” profiles on profile view are confusing or misunderstood.
Our final prototype solves the issues identified above by using “profile view” as a sub-level of navigation to the “list view”. Additionally, we created a pop-up when users first use the app that provides a short summary about how to use the app and what the buttons means.
We were of course, very satisfied with the progress we made on the design and function of this app. However, there are definitely a few aspects that we were unable to improve on given our 3 week time constraint. Given more time, we would have wanted to develop a style guide that speaks to young professionals. As it is now, our final iOS prototype primarily conveys the functional concept of the app. Furthermore, we would want to some testing on our final prototype to validate the solutions we applied to the problems we identified during our research and ideation phase.
Working in a team can definitely be a challenge. During the course of this project, it quickly became clear that communication would be vital in setting deadlines and maintaining accountability. Reaching out to the group and individually was important in recapping what we discussed during our work sessions and checking in to provide support to each other. Ultimately, maintaining these practices throughout our design process helped us complete tasks in a timely manner and ensure consensus on our next steps.
I wanted to take the time to acknowledge that that I initially proposed this idea for this project because it was something that I find relatable as a young, up-and-coming working professional myself just figuring out the job market. I plan to revisit this project in the future with a bit more industry experience in my repertoire and take the next steps to build out the mentor user flow for this project.