For my Google design exercise, I selected the second prompt: create an experience to help students discover and establish mentorship relationships. As the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics (LSBE) is the largest faculty at my university, I focused on creating a mentorship experience for the LSBE faculty. However, throughout the design process, I ensured this experience can be easily adapted towards other faculties or universities. Below, you can find the prompt I selected, and how I came up with a solution to the problem.
Time spent: 12~ hours, including writing this case study
Reading time: 8~ minutes
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.
Research
I started the process by brainstorming around the topic of mentorship and gathering initial thoughts. I conducted a competitor analysis of other university mentorship programs as well as mentorship program studies, noting down things I favoured and disliked. I also wrote down any rough features the experience would need to help connect mentors and mentees.
For further research into the LSBE faculty, I conducted a quick survey with 31 LSBE students to identify the needs/pain points of mentors and mentees. It surfaced the underlying problem, and how students like to discover mentors, connect and communicate.
Finding the Problem
Upon research, we discovered the underlying problem in mentorship experiences within the LSBE faculty.
Underlying problem:
Experienced students in the LSBE faculty were heavily under-utilized as mentors for first-year students.
So why are experienced Lazaridis students under-utilized as mentors?
There are several reasons that I discovered during research:
However, Lazaridis is a great program to facilitate a formal mentorship program for
new students due to the following areas of opportunity:
To better tackle the problem, I kept these key research findings in mind:
Solving the Problem
Keeping my research findings in mind, i settled on a mission statement and product goals to solve the problem.
Mission Statement:
Get more first-year students connected with experienced students in the LSBE community.
This will be achieved through these 4 product goals:
Sketching and Wireframes
Based on the findings in previous phases, I began creating rough sketches of the design outlining the high-level user flows, and any features I wanted to include based off of my research.
After a couple of sketching iterations, I moved my designs into wireframes. My main mission during this process was not to overcomplicate the experience and ensure that I checked whether each iteration reflected my design goals. After several iterations, the following is the final result of my user flow for mentees and mentors.
As mentioned in my research findings, students want to utilizing existing channels of communication and scheduling when communicating with mentors:
Ten Thousand Coffees as a student database and networking tool
G Suite to login to university tools and experiences
Google Calendar as a scheduling tool
Gmail to communicate
Therefore, my solution accompanies those experiences by focusing on:
I won’t be going in-depth into profile settings and calendar tools since it works similarly to other applications.
Onboarding Wireframes
As we use G Suite at our school, students simply sign in with their university Gmail and their school information is automatically populated. An optional personal bio helps mentees/mentors to know each other better.
The questionnaire is simple, with questions up top with a progress indicator. Students have the option to go back or skip ahead on certain questions. Based on research findings, the questionnaire matches students based on:
Faculty - major specialization
Interests - school organizations
Personality - optional DISC or Myers Briggs
Mentor questionnaires have two additional questions to help manage their time (Goal #3). As many students are on co-op on different semesters, mentors can select whether they want to be a mentor during the Fall, Winter, or both semesters. As well, mentors have the option of how many mentees they’d like to provide mentorship for.
Similar to the IKEA effect, the more effort you put in, the more you come to value it. Since the user spent roughly five minutes to complete the questionnaire, they want to feel a sense of accomplishment. Therefore, after completing the questionnaire, the student views a delightful loading animation while the system automatically makes matches (Goal #2). This can help the user feel that their mentor or mentees were thoughtfully selected.
Dashboard Wireframes
The dashboard for mentees and mentors is a simple one-page design with three key sections:
Your mentor’s profile/list of mentees
Meeting requests
Upcoming meetings
Mentee Dashboard
In the mentee dashboard, the mentor profile section shows details such as match percentage, major specialization, personality factors and more. To keep the experience simple (Goal #4), the contact button links to the mentor’s existing university Gmail. Mentees also get the same scheduling tools as mentors.
Mentor Dashboard
A list of mentees are shown and when selected, mentee profiles open up in an overlay. To help our mentors manage their time (Goal #3), the experience connects to the student’s university Google Calendar (Goal #4). To simplify the experience, only meeting requests and upcoming meetings are shown. Meeting details and scheduling tools open up into an overlay.
High Fidelity
Landing Page
The landing page was is an essential component to achieving Goal #1, highlighting the advantages of becoming a mentor.
The landing page has three key information areas:
Why become a mentor
Why become a mentee
How the system matches makes matches
Signing up and signing in is accessible at the top and the bottom of the page. Both call to actions lead to the same G Suite login for my university.
If students are signing up, the system will automatically identify whether the student is performing the mentor or mentee onboarding based on their year of study.
Onboarding
The onboarding process is simple and distraction free. A progress bar underneath the title helps communicate the student’s progress in the questionnaire. Next and back buttons bring the user back and forth in the onboarding process, where some pages have an additional skip button when available.
Dashboard
First photo: Mentee Dashboard
Second photo: Mentor Dashboard
The dashboard design is similar to the final iterations of wireframes. Utilizing a material theme editor, I created a straight forward design, emphasizing key activities such as the schedule button, to encourage users to establish meetings with their mentors/mentees.
Students can directly handle meeting requests from the dashboard by accepting, declining or proposing a new time. Once accepted, the invite drops down into the upcoming meetings section.
Next Steps
Despite focusing on the LSBE community in this design, I ensured during the research and design phases that this solution can be easily adapted towards other universities, faculties, or function as a general product universities can bring in to establish their own mentorship programs.
This project I integrated it with a few Google products, such as G Suite, Gmail and Google Calendar. If this project was a real experience I was working on at Google, I would try to further implement this experience into the Google ecosystem.
A particularly interesting implementation could be Google Classroom. After joining the mentorship program, the student can be automatically enrolled into a mentorship classroom, where they can find a variety of resources mentees can discover on their own time to get accustomed to campus life. Mentors can review a mentee’s assignments on Google Classroom as well, if the student is seeking academic help. Google Classroom would also conveniently allow mentees and mentors to see a full database of all participating students in the “People” section.