Google UX Design Certificate - Mentorship App
This is the final project that I completed while taking the Google UX Design Certificate on Coursera. For the final project I was tasked with creating an app for social good, which I decided to create an app to help people find mentors either out of school or in a career change.
At the beginning of my design process I initially pulled from my experience when I went to school and recently looking for advice and resources that I wished would have been there for me. With that in mind I knew I wanted to be able to connect new students, people seeking a career change and someone just looking to maybe advance in their current career.
Pulling from my own experience I spoke with other people as well to get good data about what they would want from an experience like this.
Now with some initial interviews complete I was able to boil my data down into the following items, I knew I would want to be available for users in the app.
- A messenger portion of the app to be able to make calls and send messages.
- Filters to be able to find mentors easily.
- An on boarding process to match a user with a mentor.
- A way for users to set the days that are best for them and rough time to be able to match them with mentors that would be available as well.
From there I created some user personas, one of which can be seen below, to help me empathize with users. I always like to have a face that I can go back to and ask if what I am designing is going to be good for my named user.
With those ideas in mind I began with sketching out some initial ideas on what I thought that the app could look like. I had some initial ideas about what I wanted the app to look like based off of other apps that I have used. There were things that I liked and things that I didn’t like so I used the things I liked as inspiration.
Some of those sketches for the app can be seen here:
Now that I had a decision of what the base page of the app would look like I began to build out wireframes of the app. I tried to design the app screens with the concept that the app would also need to be a website as well. I put together the wireframes seen below and then proceeded to prototype the app.
Upon testing the prototype I discovered that it might be helpful to people to be able to watch content created by mentors. While the main focus of the app is to connect people to mentors for a meaningful conversation some feedback that showed that it could be beneficial to users to see content created by a mentor to learn from and preview how the mentor approaches teaching.
With that feedback I went back to my wireframes and made some tweaks to the pages of the app. I added a section to the front page for videos to be seen, as well a section on a mentor’s page to showcase some videos.
Having made the revisions to the design it was time to move into high fidelity designs. The challenges for this portion of the app was deciding how to highlight the videos and the mentors for users. It was necessary to make a decision between the two items but ultimately I decided to highlight the mentors above the videos of the mentors in the app. The reason I chose to highlight the mentors over the videos in the app was to drive the connection between the user and finding a mentor. Since having someone to check in with on a regular schedule seemed more valuable to the user.
With the high fidelity designs of the app completed I also created some designs for a tablet version of the site and the site to be viewed on a desktop computer. Some of those designs can be seen below.
With the design completed with the time available I am pretty happy overall with the design. If I were to make any changes to the design I would like to revisit the main page of the application and try some different versions. Since most of the time that I spent on the designs and testing I would also really like to revisit the website to spend more time with the design and functionality of the website.
