overview

While the University of Toronto offers lots of career support, many students found that current services are too generic, and untailored to their specific needs as career officers themselves may not be fully knowledgeable about every single career aspect. In addition, students currently do not feel ready to take on the challenges at workplaces due to insufficient access to personalized mentorships. Therefore, MentorMe aims to help alleviate some of these pain points and develop more meaningful and value-add mentorship experiences for students on campus.

Design process

Research

Our primary and secondary research provided us with a deeper level of insight into some of the frustrations that students experience when it comes to their career development. These pain points can largely be defined by four general themes:

• Lack of access to real industry insights – current campus career officers may not be well versed with the actual industry and thus provide insufficient information.
• Lack of access to meaningful advice – advice provided by career-related services at universities are often too broad and generic.
• Lack of effective networking opportunities
• Lack of individualized career support – students mainly depend on family and friends, who play a stronger role in his career decisions than school’s career support. Without proper guidance from experts, this makes it harder for students to seek valuable suggestions according to their needs.

Define

We came up with Peter Parker as our proto-persona, a 21 year old Computer Science UofT student from America who is on a hunt to find the perfect job in Canada. This persona was eventually updated into a full persona with gathered user data.

We also did additional primary research on our stakeholder persona, Tony Stark, an experienced working professional who could be a potential personal mentor to Peter Parker. We did quick interviews with 5 people of this demographic, aged 35 and above.

These user profiles were mapped into empathy maps and an as-is scenario. We found that there are challenges primarily in the Discovery, Exploration and Networking stages of UofT students’ career development journey.

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Ideate

By understanding Peter’s attributes, we identified 5 needs statements to tackle. Our next step was to ideate based on the areas of opportunity we identified. As a team, we came up with over 20 different ideas — six of which were my own.

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We voted for four of these ideas that ranked highest on feasibility and impact:

• Resume critique — having professionals to review your resume/cover letters.
• Personal Advisor — to provide students 1-to-1 coaching anytime, anywhere.
• Personality Assessment — a way to assess students’ career and mentor fit based on hobbies, interests, lifestyle, etc.
• Pet play date — a form of ice breaker to connect with a professional mentor in an informal setting.

These top ideas were incorporated into our targeted vision for the user journey:

Prototype

Using our top ideas, we created storyboards to brainstorm how students could use our app.

We took features we liked from each of our sketches and refined them. Together, these features formed the core functionalities of our app, MentorMe for UofT:

1. AI career assessment — offers job predictions that reflect qualities that go beyond resumes to ensure his choices align with his core values.
2. Suggested Mentors for Selection — to connect with industry professionals without participating in anxiety inducing activites
3. Ask for Help (Ad Hoc) Option — to get relevant career advice and support without having to go through multiple channels
4. Communication mode options of video call, phone call, face-to-face and live chat – option on how depending on their preference

Low-fidelity prototype

Based on these core functionalities, we designed a low-fi prototype, which I personally sketched out using pen and paper:

MID-fidelity prototype

To understand if we were on the right track, we conducted a formative usability with our paper prototype in-person or virtually with 4 participants. We gave them 3 tasks to perform using a think-aloud protocol:

1. Take the MentorMe assessment, view suggested mentors and get matched with mentor
2. Find a mentor using the filter function and invite him/her to chat
3. Find your scheduled meeting and start interacting with the mentor

We ended each test with an interview to gather additional feedback. Shown below are a few of the findings and iterations we made to our mid-fi prototype.

final, High-fidelity prototype

I eventually designed the prototype into hi-fi mockups for a finer representation.

Evaluate

We conducted one more round of usability test with 4 new representative users. Using similar tasks and protocol, we discovered the following:

Strengths

Intuitive with good ease of use — All 4 participants were able to complete the all 3 tasks successfully without trouble.

AI assessment is a very innovative concept — As users get job suggestions that reflect qualities that go beyond resumes to ensure his choices align with his personal values.

Convenience — Users can connect with industry professional without participating in anxiety-inducing networking activities, and get career support all in one place.

Considerations

Noticeability of “Take Career Assessment” prompt — The use of ‘AI’ acronym is still unrecognizable. Pop-up overlay for AI assessment is still less noticeable by participants. How can we adjust this feature to make it more noticeable?

Search filter function — Current search bar is ideal for keyword searching but not good for searching by filtered categories. Can we include a category drop down as well?

Ensuring active mentor participation — How can we ensure that busy industry mentors are responsive on the app?

Our next steps would be to continue to iterate on the designs based on the feedback we received. This includes re-evaluating our existing features (i.e. AI assessment prompt and search bar) and integrating new features (e.g. to sustain mentor users’ active participation).

Key lessons

1. We are not the user.  Recognize the reality that our opinions of users’ needs may not always align with actual data. Instead, we must set aside our ego and immerse ourselves in research to find the pain points that truly matter.
2. Asking the right questions is challenging. It’s true what they say, “Great questions lead to great design.” Figuring out what those questions are, however, is often half the battle and this project proved no different.
3. Storytelling is powerful. After four presentations in front of industry professionals, I’ve learned the importance of visual storytelling in establishing emotional connection with audience and demonstrating product value. As a fundamental human experience, a good story can help build a memorable and engaging atmosphere where empathizing with users becomes a much easier endeavour.
4. UX design is a team sport. Developing a product requires a whole range of skills that one person alone will never possess. Working as a team with diverse backgrounds provides us with the opportunity to collaborate while leveraging our individual strengths to achieve a common goal.

Extras

To wrap up our project, we created a fun little promotional video for our app! I personally designed the templates and storyline from scratch with PowerPoint and Figma!