Problem Statement
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.
Initial Exploration
During the research phase, I wanted to dig deeper mainly in these problem areas
The experience of first year students at Georgia Tech - both the fun parts and challenges
The current ways in which new students reach out for help and advice - to whom and through what medium
The expectations and difficulties of both mentors and mentees
The reasons which make a student want to become a mentor
Presently available facilities at Georgia Tech for helping students - success stories and failures
Lastly, the role of teachers, academic advisors and other staff play in this experience
Comparative Analysis
I studied existing web-portals, phone applications and dedicated programs related to mentorships, academic counseling and general life advice.
I specifically looked into the mentorship programs available at Tech, since this was the ecosystem I was targeting.
Semi-structured Interviews
Ideally, I would want to conduct interviews to gain rich qualitative data and then leverage those findings to prepare a survey questionnaire which could then be distributed widely.
Due to time constraints, I decided to conduct only interviews in-order to collect qualitative data for the problem areas I was looking into.
I interviewed five participants - of three different nationalities, two of them were alumni who had completed their undergrad at Tech a couple of years ago, the other three are currently in their second semester of grad school at Tech.
Analysis of Findings
I used affinity diagramming to categorize the research findings. The higher level sticky notes helped me frame four ‘How might we?’ questions. We will progressively discuss the major research findings and insights and how they informed my design decisions.
How might we..
make the process of becoming a mentor simpler for a student?
improve the visibility of potential mentors to students?
help new students accustomize themselves to life at Georgia Tech?
motivate all the students to perform better academically as well as outside school?
Brainstorming and Ideation
“I wish I would have known this sooner”
Almost every interviewee talked about how their first semester would have been smoother if someone would have informed them about the realities of college life sooner.
We learn from the mistakes of others, so what is wrong with proudly declaring these goof-ups so that other students do not repeat them?
The Wall
The idea here is to dedicate empty walls throughout the campus for students to stick-up post-it notes with one or more ‘I wish would have know sooner‘ moments from their time at school.
The rationale behind this component is to make new students feel more comfortable when they start school. Reading everyone else’s mistakes makes the experienced students appear more relatable to the new students.
Recollecting these memories and writing and discussing them with fellow students also invokes nostalgia in the older students which might increase their motivation to help new students so that they do not repeat the same mistakes they made.
“I wanted to become a mentor because it feels great to help someone”
Interviewees mentioned feeling good about themselves when they were able to help someone or give useful advice.
Most interviewees said that the main reason they wanted to help another student was because they had been through similar situations at school and hence they very well understood what the less experienced students were going through.
THE POSTERS
These are mildly amusing, light-hearted posters with personas whose traits are characteristic of students new to school. Many such posters will be put up throughout the campus.
Again here, the rationale behind this is to try to attract as much attention as possible from the experienced students and encourage them to help incoming students by making them empathetic towards these clueless students.
While I did consider incentives such as gift-cards or even credit points to encourage students into helping others, none of the research findings favored this consideration. Almost every interviewee said they choose to help others for reasons other than personal gains.
“I usually ask someone I know for help”
Every interviewee said when in doubt, they would ask someone they know. An obvious drawback - you are restricted by the radius of your own social circle.
Things get slightly better if your friends' recommend their friends for suggestions or help - your network grows to some extent.
But even then, there is no direct interaction with seniors for most students at Georgia Tech and neither is there a way to get to know them.
“No one has time to fill out 30 documents in-order to become a mentor”
A major shortcoming of mentorship programs it that they require students to fill out lengthy forms and dedicate stipulated time slots to meet with their mentees weekly, even when there is nothing to discuss.
Interviewees talked about how they would prefer a system which would not require them to invest a lot of time or be under obligations to make too many commitments - something a lot more “loose.“
Mentor matching and Luck
Interviewees expressed their concern about how matching algorithms used by most mentorship programs are not very concrete.
While someone might luckily end up with a great mentor, another might get stuck with an irresponsive mentor for an entire semester.
There is no survival in school without self-motivation
Every interviewee without a fail talked about how they were not used to scheduling, time-management and the general discipline needed to be successful in school.
Surely mentors help new students in a lot of ways which is why the school wants to encourage students to help each other. But, university life has a major self-motivation component to it and there is no denying this fact.
The sooner new students learn to accept this and inculcate self-motivation as a habit, it will be more fruitful to them in the long run.
“I know people who have called seniors and cried to them about how crazy the semester has gotten”
There are days when no amount of self-motivation will work and a student might be crushed under the pressure of deadlines while everything would seem to be falling-apart.
At such times, most students just want a good listener to vent out, only to help them calm their nerves, release stress and then go back to their sane selves.
THE APP
Georgia Tech Yellow Pages is your old-school phone directory.
Students sign up using their Georgia Tech ID to ensure authenticity and safety.
Both incoming students and experienced students then fill in a small bio about their interests, background, classes they have taken, strengths and also weaknesses.
They also fill in their weekly availability, which they can be changed whenever they want.
With this, the student now has their own page in the directory.
Others can look up students by searching their names, keywords or browsing majors and then text them to chat.
When someone is viewing a person’s info page, they can see the student’s interests, strengths, Georgia Tech email address and they will see a green sign if according to the student’s mentioned availability, this is a free time slot for them.
Anyone can post their golden words of advice, if they can fit the text into a flashcard.
Two self-reported grade-sheets, will be available to the students in the self-introspection section - one for academic performance and another for overall well-being.
Both of these sheets consist of 5 questions - on a Likert scale, asking the student to evaluate how their week has been.
The calculated scores will then be visualized next to each other as a bar graph - the goal of the student is to balance the bars of their scores in both the categories - because all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Lastly, an S.O.S. button which, when pushed, sends a text-message to three predefined contacts if things are getting out of control during the semester.
Finally, here is a low-fidelity mock-up of the proposed solution.
No matching mentors to mentees or assigned meet-up timings?
No one is an expert at everything - which means the word ‘mentor‘ is a rolling title. My research findings reiterate multiple times that the only prerequisites one looks for in a mentor is that they are approachable and relatable.
Since here there are no assigned mentor-mentee roles, every student is free to discover other Georgia Tech students and reach out, to ask for help or even to help them with their weaknesses.
Another research finding was how new students also want to be independent and want to make their own mistakes. They should be given the freedom to explore.
A solution like this can be fit into the existing ecosystem at Georgia Tech because it will not require too many resources. It is just a small change - a facilitation. But sometimes, even small changes can cause ripple effects.
Visual Design
I decided to stick with Georgia Tech’s school colors - Golden Yellow and Dark Blue to give the app an authentic feel. I used the baseline theme from Material Design as a starting point and created the high-fidelity mock-ups on Sketch.
Georgia Tech - Yellow Pages
These are mock-ups of the ‘form-filling’ and ‘viewing student info’ user flow. You can click on each individual image to see it in a larger size.
What can be improved?
I would have loved more time to do intense user research, looking at incoming students who have not been to Georgia Tech yet, studying the role cultures and nationalities play and even how teachers and advisors can help.
Factors such as visibility of the posters, effectiveness and significance of the S.O.S button, tackling its overuse/misuse, are few of the things which still need work. Creating posters with personas of senior students is also something which could be done to draw attention of the new students towards the app. Even introduction of this application to new students during the orientation sessions could be useful.
Throughout the ideation phase, I was in two minds about the inclusion of a chat feature. Ultimately, I decided in the favour of a basic chat-window in order to facilitate initial conversation between interested students before they move on to a platform they are more comfortable with.
However, the late decision on this front is mainly the reason why no chat-window screens show up in any of the prototypes.
A consequent complication that arises with the addition of a chat-box is how to handle incessant notifications and spam, since these would defeat the purpose of keeping the app passive and non-intrusive.
Without a doubt, plenty of thought would also need to go into deciding the most effective questions to put in the self-evaluation sheet, if a Likert scale is the best way to take input and also whether the resultant scores need to be numerical or categorical.
Another inclusion I was looking at was the use of gamification to encourage more students to fill in these self-evaluation sheets. It could be something as simple as instead of a bar graph, the scores could be visualized using a cartoon version of the student trying to balance his work and play scores week by week.
Final Comments
There is never a perfect solution and I could have managed my time better to conduct proper user testing at the low-fidelity stage to validate my ideas before moving on to the next stage. Accessible design features such as a screen reader or voice to text are also some additions I would have loved to include. Nonetheless, I immensely enjoyed working on this design challenge and learned a whole bunch of new things in this short span of seven days.