Duration: Jan - Aug 2023
Team: Mengzhe Ye, Qinglin Feng, Amanda Frey, Yichen Li, Tia Tang
My Role: Designer Lead , conducted user interviews and data collection, organize client meetings, prioritized user flows, and created wireframes and final prototypes.
Smart Futures is a leading provider of online career education resources and training to schools and community-based organizations in Pennsylvania. They have developed the platform to offer these intuitive, well-rounded, and affordable, solutions for schools to meet Work-Based Learning (WBL) requirement as defined by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Currently, they're planning to enhance their platform, emphasizing the engagement and enrichment of work-based learning (WBL) experiences for both WBL providers and students.
Mentors often find it difficult to stay motivated after a few sessions, and it becomes hard to form a meaningful relationship between mentors and mentees.
Currently, Smart Futures is facing issues with a low mentor retention rate and they are having trouble motivating mentors to create high-quality content for the platform. These mentors reported they were feeling less engaged in sessions and find it difficult to continue sessions with limited guidance. Below are four major challenges that mentors are encountering.
Lack of Effective Guidance from the platform
Time Constraints Due to Busy Schedules
Diminishing Motivation due to Lack of Feedbacks
Difficulty in Building Relationships with Mentees
The final product significantly streamlines the content creation process for mentors, offering an AI writing assistant and customizable content templates. These features are designed to provide efficient and effective support, especially for mentors who face time constraints in preparing teaching materials. By generating intuitive and clear instructions, the product simplifies the authoring process, making it easier for mentors to create engaging and educational content for students in the limited time.
Learn how to make this animation here
Our team conducted a competitor analysis of 10 companies and their products that are currently in the market. I worked with two other researchers specifically looked at products that fell into one or more of the following categories: Career Planning, Video-based ContentMentor, Mentee Connection, Online Asynchronous Interaction.
In analyzing ten competitor products, I identified key features and mapped them based on uniqueness and relevance. The uniqueness axis compared competitors' features with Smart Futures' features to see if they were similar or unique. This process aided us in prioritizing some focus area (highlighted in the graph) where improvement could bring the most value to business.
With the research, we learned that one of the biggest challenges of our client comes from the techniques feasibility of creating the synchronous sessions between mentors and mentees. For example, live sessions require moderators to ensure that the healthy learning environment for high schoolers but the platform currently has limited administration staff and technical difficulty to maintain the live sessions. Therefore, we priotized the features that promote asynchronous communication between mentors and mentees.
To bridge the research gap, we created the interview protocols and conducted qualitative interviews with school career counselors and organizers of work-based learning. These sessions provided us with valuable insights into how schools are currently preparing for students’ career educations as well as pain points and motivations among working professionals.
Target User Analysis
We created the mentor persona to help us better understand their motivations and needs during the mentoring activities with high schoolers.
Lack of students’ feedback on his contributions to evaluate his teaching.
Unsure whether the prepare content translate well to the younger kids
User Journey Map
To better understand the process, I utilized the experience map to identify key stages and users' actions and touch points, throughout the process of mentoring actives and identify the major pain points. This map informed us the next design direction.
Mentors were unable to be engaged in the mentoring session. Because..
Mentors often have a limited understanding of their mentees' career learning goals and topcis perference.
Require more resources to create tailored content to meet the differing goals and needs of individual students
Mentors often lack effective guidance and scaffolding when producing content for mentoring sessions.
Require more resources to create tailored content to meet the differing goals and needs of individual students
How might we enable busy tech professionals to create mentoring content in an engaging and effective way?
I led the team in conducting a "5 Whys" activity, delving into underlying user needs and defined the root problem. This paved the direction for the idea brainstorm stage and refined our focus to three promising ideas and we choose the idea of AI-powered Mentorship Content Creation Builder.
Online Mentor Community
A way for mentors to get inspiration from experienced mentors
Aggregated Feedback/Review Analysis
Summarize the received feedbacks to mentors by using NLP
AI-powered Mentorship Content Creation Builder
Summarize the received feedbacks to mentors by using NLP
I facilitated two workshops with various stakeholders to discuss the features impacting the mentor user and ranked these according to which would have the most impact (voting results). The discussion grounded our design decision and informed the next step. Here are some screenshots of how we crafted the stories to illustrate each idea clearly.
Most of the features that I’m working on have not been released publicly yet.
Please email me for more project details. Thanks!
