iMentor App
MOBILE APP • CASESTUDY
INTRODUCTION
A few months ago, my designer friends and I were recalling the struggles of landing our first job right after we freshly graduated from university. The lack of experience coupled with poor networking skills was truly a recipe for disaster. As we all have transitioned into the UX field from completely different backgrounds, this got us thinking: Would it be just as challenging to land our first UX design job as a bootcamp graduate?
Online research and forum led me to the following conclusion: It will be challenging, but with a strong portfolio and resume, it’s most definitely possible.
MY ROLE
User research, synthesize, product design, and style guide.
THE TEAM
3 designers, 1 researcher
TIMELINE
June 2022 - August 2022
The Problem
New UX design students lack the industry insight and experience to kickstart their careers.
As a UX design student myself, I noticed many bootcamps provide career services for their student, but they are limited to only 1 session per week. For students that want additional support, what should they do?
The Solution
A Mentorship App:
My team and I developed an app to provide a platform that connects new UX/UI professionals with experienced UX/UI professionals in the industry in order to:
Gain industry insights
Offer career support
Portfolio review sessions
Research
User research
Starting off with user research, we began to interview students enrolled in a UX bootcamp and UX designers within the industry on topics related to career and motivation. We conducted interviews with 5 UX design students and 2 UX designers. From our interviews, we concluded that students were interested in a mentorship program and were willing to pay to participate. As for the UX designers, they were willing to mentor depending on the passion of the mentees
“The biggest factor for me to take on a mentee is their level of commitment and passion for design.”
“I’m not sure where to start looking. Having a mentor would greatly help, and I’m more than willing to pay.”
Competitor analysis
After analyzing the top 3 most popular mentoring app, we found that none of them focused specifically on the UX design field, thus making it too broad. This then became our opportunity to shine.
User Insight
After we collected the user interview data, we started to piece together the common themes. We discovered that UX design students needed professional guidance from experienced UX designers because they require advice to help them navigate through their desired career path in the Tech industry as UX designers.
Persona
We took the results from user interviews and insights to create our user persona. This helped us manifest a character from the data we collected. It also helps us understand our users better.
Storyboard
Next, we came up with what the typical user journey would look like for our user as she tries to navigate her new career herself. Creating a storyboard helps my team understand the larger context in which our app will be used.
User flow chart
Up until now, we didn’t know how our app was going to function. So, to figure out our user path, we sketched it out on paper and then rendered it digitally.
Sketches:
The first step in ideation was to sketch out our ideas on paper.
Wire framing
Wireframing helped us visualize how our app was going to function. This allowed us to quickly test out ideas: running user testing and making iterations without spending too much time.
Final design:
Final screens
Link to slide deck
Prototype
Test out our mid-fi prototype here
EMERGING THEME FROM RESEARCH
😄 Bigger sample size
For this particular project, I mainly interviewed individuals within my boot camp cohort. This may have caused some bias. Therefore having a bigger pool of students from across other boot camps may reveal different trends.
Looking back, these are some of the learning outcomes from this project
👩🏫 Mentor’s turn
We focused mainly on the students. However, we should have also taken into consideration the insight of the mentors. (they make up the other half of our app!)
🔬More testing
Moving forward, we will continue to iterate and user test to further improve the user experience.