How to encourage experienced students to connect with new students and help them adjust to campus life?

iMentor

A mobile application designed to allow new students to discover experienced students as mentors, while at the same time encouraging experienced students to help other students succeed academically and professionally.

UX Design | Visual Design | Mobile App Design

Tool

Sketch; Photoshop, Protopie.

My role

Interaction & Visual designer & UX Researcher

Duration

1 Week

Process

Existing Mentorship Program

In the competitive analysis, I found that there are a lot of existing resources and mentorship programs, like FIUTS and FIG, on helping freshmen and new master students to adjust to campus life. However, there is no mentorship program that can help new students from both academic and professional perspectives. According to my user interviews, new master students and transfer students would like to receive more academic and professional help, rather than finding good restaurants, familiarize with buildings and campus facilities, or other life-related mentorship. However, their needs are often ignored and thus there is no way for them to get the right help. 

In addition, my research showed that experienced students are more willing to offer academic or professional-related mentorship.

As a result, I decided to narrow down the target users (mentees) to first-year Master students and junior-level transfer students who just joined the college.

Target Users

Rephrased Design Questions

How to design a platform that allows new Master and junior-level transfer students to discover experienced students as mentors, while at the same time encouraging experienced students to help other students succeed academically and professionally?

Research

To further understand user problems, I conducted 7 user interviews with:

• 3 experienced students:
  • second-year Master students
• 4 new students：
  • 2 first-year Master student
  • 1 Junior transfer student
  • 1 Freshman

Problems

Brainstorm & Ideation

Wireframes & Iterations

I conducted 5 usability testings on the initial wireframes and refine the wireframes and workflows based on the testing results. 

Before iteration

After iteration

How does the system work?

On-boarding

When students first log in, we will ask students to select a role (mentor or mentee) they want to play and fill out a list of questions. The experience for Mentors and Mentees are different but within a consistent ecosystem. 

Apart from that, a student can choose to switch between mentor and mentee roles by simply change preferences in their profiles. 

Mentee's Workflow

As a mentee, you are expected to proactively reach out to mentors, clarify the help you are looking for, and initiate and run the following meet-ups once connected with the mentor.

Explore: Discover the right mentors

According to my user research, mentors are expected that mentees will proactively reach out to them, as they don't wish to offer help to someone who does not really need their help or is reluctant to reach out. Thus, my system encourages users to proactively connect with mentors.

To connect with a mentor, the mentee needs to send a personalized message to them, indicating their desire to connect with that mentor and clarify their needs and problems.

Me: Schedule a meet-up

The system will encourage mentees to initiate the first meet-up and reach out to mentors proactively.

Users can choose to save the meet-up to their Google calendar.

Mentor's Workflow

As a mentor, you do not need to spend much time and effort into finding a mentee. Our system will display your profile to mentees that we think are perfect fits for you. You will receive connection requests from mentees if they think you are the right person they want to talk to.

To minimize chaos, you can select the max number of requests you want to receive each time, and we will hide your profile temporarily from other students once the requests reach your limit.

Explore: Help mentors find the right mentee

Me: Mange meet-ups

Chat: AI tips for mentors

Student mentors are often concerned about their ability to manage the mentorship. Thus, to help them succeed as a mentor, the system offers communication tips via an integrated AI system. Through this feature, I hope to create a seamless training experience to mentors, rather than providing them with explicit training that may take too much of their time. 

Switch between mentor and mentee

In the research, some participants mentioned that they would like to be both mentor and mentee. To help them achieve that goal, we allow users to switch between mentor mode and mentee mode in their profile settings.

Integrate into the Existing Ecosystem

Before scheduling the meet-up, the system will retrieve data from both the mentor's and mentee's calendar app and will display the dates and time that work for both groups.

Before the meet-up day, users can save meet-ups in their calendars. 

On the meet-up day, users can choose to open the meet-up location in a map app to navigate to the right destination.

Visual Design

I want to give users a sense of:

• Efficient & Clean: I want to minimize the cognitive load for users as they want the process of finding mentors/mentees as smooth as possible.
• Consistent: The experience for mentors and mentees should be consistent.
• Friendly: I wish all students, no matter if they are mentors or mentees, will feel a sense of equality.
• Trendy: The design should be trendy enough to attract young generations.

Thank You :)