THE PRODUCT

My story

I am born and brought up in India, and before arriving at the United States, I pursued my undergrad in Computer Science and went on to work in the tech industry. Over the period of being in college and then entering into the workforce, I found lack of gender diversity and mentorship was a defining factor to my success. Being connected to the right women leaders and learning from the experiences has been monumental for my motivation of staying strong in my aspirations to increase diversity in technology industry!

Problem

How we can make our girls strong and confident through mentorship at young age, to take up the opportunities in the male-dominant tech industry so that they successfully reach leadership positions and fulfil their career aspirations.

Outcome

A mobile application that provides an online network that helps college girls (mentees) to get matched to women already in the workforce (mentors) based on the problem-solution data crowdsourced over time.

Interactive prototype built on Figma

My Role

Interaction Designer

Duration

4 months (Aug 2019 - Dec 2019)

Tools

Figma

Core responsibilities

Devise a problem statement and define its user base
Sketch out ideas to explore all solution strategies and design Lo-Fi prototype by shortlisting key funstionalities
Through usability testing of paper prototypes, design high fidelity prototypes to take for next round of testing

Feed with posts

Scroll and interact, be in this together!

Mentors and mentees use this space to scroll through the different questions and concerns posted by the members. The main ways to interact with each other is using the reply, block and delete button

Posting questions

Post with no inhibitions, you are in a safe and non-judgemental space!

This is the mail highlight of this application where the mentees can post public questions using safety controls like anonymity and switching off the replies.

Building your profile

Share your interests, network with people and track your progress securely!

This feature lets the mentees and mentors add tags, interests and their background on the profile. User can access their posts and see their interaction tracking that is confidential to them.

PROCESS

Running crazy 8 ideas

Sketching with pen and paper is the best way to get started to give life to your solutions. After this exercise, I realized that in this case the community engagement of the women cannot be ignored and it would be great to strike a balance between the two or translate offline community experiences into online ones. After taking feedback from peers, I felt that first idea below in the picture with 1x1 online mentorship successfully meets the criteria for the success of this platform.

Storyboarding

Expanding the ideas into storyboards brought more clarity in the idea and got me one step closer to the final designs.

Persona

The persona building was to understand the users I was targeting and problems they face which I must solve for!

User journey map

It was important to understand the step my step flow for each of these personas.

Design ideology

Safe Space Creation/Non Judgemental

Non-Intrusive with privacy controls

For women by women!

DESIGN

Key features & Lo-fi Wireframes

Feed: This section gives the users the opportunity to take part in the conversations that are initiated by their peers. They can save, view and comment on the post in this section and also filter posts based on their interests. The student can also quickly view the profiles of the mentor by clicking on the photo icon of each comment in the chats. The intention is to inspire girls to willingly initiate, continue and be part of conversations by helping them view the initiatives of their peers and discover more mentors.
Post a question: This part of the interaction is about helping the student post a question by categorizing and choosing privacy options. This application focusses on creating a safe space for girls so that they can ask all types of questions by choosing options of anonymity and who can reply to their posts. The user should also have the option to add various category tags to the question for the matching to happen right with the peers and mentors via filters.
My account: This section of the app helps the users(students) manage their profiles, activity, and mentors they have connected with. The students can see and edit their profiles, interests, mentors, and activity from time to time. This is also the place where the users see their activity dashboard which is totally personal to them and can share their progress with their mentors if they wish to. The posts that the users save in the feeds section also appear here.

Paper prototypes

This was one of the most fun and creative part of the process of creating prototypes. I made various screens of the wireframes to be tested by peer women in the School of Information at the University of Michigan.

This was the feedback collected from the usability testing of the paper prototypes:

Changing the landing page from ‘Post a question’ to ‘News Feed’

Making the posting process less complicated

Adding option to view saved posts

Having options to block user/posts

Making privacy options more prominent

Visual guide

To decide the color theme of the app, I wanted to experiment with pink style guides as it would give relevance to this female-led platform. The color palette follows google material design guidelines for color and font accessibility. The logo symbolizes the collaboration and the venus symbol of women merged together.

HOW TO PROCEED FURTHER

Next steps

Mentor side of platform
In the limited availability of time, I could not design completely for the mentor side of the platform. This side would have flows around providing help to mentees of your domain, playing with relevant tags, easing out reply process, and incentivizing mentors to be contribute to the platform.
In-built chat functionality
The current prototype allows mentors and mentees connect through other platforms as there is no chat platform in built in the current system. The vision is of the system is not only to help match the mentees to their mentors but also let them ask their concerns and questions in a 1x1 setup.

HOW TO GET BETTER

Learnings

Interaction design and visual design go hand in hand
After designing the interactions of the user flows, the main life to the prototypes was given by the visual design. Following a guideline of design system (in this material design) made me confident about my choices of UI elements and their functionalities.
Using privacy and security controls in a small way makes large differences
It was meaningful to know how various UI elements as small as a star reaction has different psychological effects on different types of people. Using them at different levels create different notions in the community and its members

Designing a safe mentorship network for women in STEM

Feed with posts

Posting questions

Building your profile