Google Design Challenge 2020: Building A Stronger And More Inspiring Community.
About
At the beginning of 2020, I spent one week designing a mentor and mentee
platform to help new incoming international students match with desired mentors at California College of the Arts.
As an international student, I understood the struggle of starting life and study in a new and unfamiliar place. Hence, thanks to Google Design offers this special and precious opportunity for me to express my ideas and actualize them through design.
Through this individual design project, I am intending to target on the need of the international students who is new to campus and also lifestyles at San Francisco. I am expecting this platform is capable of encouraging these students to feel more engaging and welcoming and less anxious about unfamiliar environments.
Problem：
Design a mentorship program to help strengthen the community and help new students adjust to campus life.
Solution:
Campus Mentorship Program mobile App:
Matches mentee and mentor based on needs, strengths, available time, and majors with efficiency.
Free meeting schedule adjustment.
Delightful endorsement system to increase accountability and engagement.
Both mentors and mentees can stay creative and inspired by sharing passages, tutorials and workshop videos in the community.
Research And Analysis
1. Competitor Analysis
I noticed that CCA student organizations also use Facebook, LinkedIn to organize the event. Besides these two platforms, there is a language learning app where users can match with a native speaker as the mentor based on the demand of learning a new language that demonstrates the process of detailed mentor and mentee matching. The positions of mentor and mentees are not fixed: everyone on the platform can switch the role based on different demand and skills.
2. Existing Campus Platform
Besides the market, CCA LRC (learning resource center) might be the closest and familiar existing example where allow students to look up a mentor with typical skills such as programming, writing, and software. However, my research showed that actually there are very few people who actually used or know this program (in the graph) or are very satisfied with the experience with the learning resource center.
User Interview
Besides the survey on the usage of CCA Learning Resource Center, I was attempting to be more aware of the hardship that international students encountered when they started to study abroad.
I phone/text interviewed several international students based on the question: “what did you feel most difficult when you came to the U.S to study”. I received about 35 response and the top three questions are:
Do not know how to make friends because of the language barrier
Writing and listening/hard to follow the course material
Do not have outside life besides going to course because barely know the place.
Key Insights:
Current mentor-mentee platform at CCA:
Very few people know it due to lack of broadcasting
Not target on incoming freshman students but more about post-graduate and career hunting.
Facebook and LinkedIn are very generic and packed with different functionalities but not designed for specific groups.
Mentor and mentees should not be fixed. Learning from each other is a sustainable relationship/ start point of a new friendship
Persona
Based on all of the primary and secondary research, I created the following persona of mentees and mentors
Mentees:
Mentor:
Actualize Solution
Based on persona, I decided the platform should focus on:
exchanging skills and skills sharing: mentors and mentees are not drawn out by a line but instead, this experience should encourage people to express their strength and develop or improve new skills.
Meet up both offline and online: mentors and mentees can adjust their meeting locations and schedules based on their time.
Skills building through gamified experience: mentors and mentees can look up and match up based on the demand for specific skills.
The tone is gamified because I believe gamification can empower people’s positivity and also the sustainability of platform usage.
Information Architecture
Low-Fi Wireframe
Branding
Functionalities analysis: Hi-FI Prototype
Onboarding
To begin with, both mentor and mentees will need to use their verified school emails to register their account. The main question is how to evaluate if the mentor sign-up is good enough? Considering that GPA weights differently in Art and Design focused school but rather, a good portfolio or works usually speaks for the artist or designer and moreover, the application does not want to draw a fine line between mentor and mentee but rather than encouraging “skills sharing” as the feature, to become mentor, the users need to have a portfolio or personal website and also skills tag to start.
Another information is the user's schedule, the application is encouraging users to use their spare time to gather up online or offline for the mentoring process; therefore, matching potential mentors or mentees based on the individual schedule will help users to access and engage.
Gamification Experience: Badging
Gamification can be powerful. In this case, the “badging” feature allows mentees and mentors to express their appreciation and encouragement so that users are more engaged. Also, gamification can behave as an “ice-breaking” effect.
After successfully connecting with mentors/mentees, users can easily “badge” the person on their page to easily express as an endorsement.
Flexible Meeting Time
Mentor and mentees can be both offline and online. To schedule a meeting, it can be easily handled inside message system and synchronized with users’ calendar: Apple calendar or google calendar.
This can help maintain a mentor-mentee relationship and meanwhile help users adapt a recurring habits to continue mentoring.
Share, Create, and Encourage
To make a more engaging and bonding community, besides the one-on-one mentor process, this platform intends to encourage users to share their skills, progress, and idea of the project. As students in the creative field, inspiration is very essential and the feature “Explore” can help users to be inspired mutually. Moreover, the platform will welcome the organizer of student communities for events notification so that more people can participate.
User Testing Takeaway:
I deploy the Hi-fi prototype to several CCA freshmen students through Figma, through testing some insights/questions/critiques I collected are:
1. It took me a while to enter my skills tag at the beginning. As a user, I do not want to spend a very long time on a registration session
2. The schedule time is weird because it only shows time but not emphasize what kind of meeting. Is it online? offline? if the mentor are meeting with mentees face to face, should there be a location?
3. Not many people have a website. Some people with a very strong portfolio may not put everything on the internet. Should there be a gallery view of all the creative works instead of just a website?
Takeaway
I am really glad that I had this wonderful chance to fully and quickly express a design that can benefit the community I stay in. If there is more time, I believe I will iterate more user interviews and user testing to improve this design. I think the major takeaway from this micro-design project is scoping on a very specific group of users and expand on. As an international student, I had hard time when I just started my college journey in America. With this empathy, I finally decided and found my focused target. Thank you Google for giving me this chance!