Magic Eye Data-driven decisions
How can we help people find the best career guidance through mentorship?
How can we help people find the best career guidance through mentorship?
Compass
My Role —
User Experience &User Interface Design
Compass was a week-long design challenge from Google. The challenge was to design an online mentorship product, and I decided to focus on building a career guidance mentorship program. This project was based on my personal experience. I struggled to discover my interest and focus area around my high school graduation, and Compass allowed me to look back and think about what I would have liked back in the day. Within a week, I conducted user interviews, wireframed a few design directions, tested in front of users, and delivered high-fidelity mock-ups of four complete flows.
How it works
Discover the knowledge, not the connections
While Compass's ultimate goal is to establish a successful mentorship between users, it does not force that to happen. Upon onboarding, users can discover insightful articles posted by other members. The focus always remains on the user's journey of finding and developing their career.
Detailed review breakdown
Users can learn what others have to say about a potential mentor. A detailed review breakdown can give a more accurate picture of the user's possible match.
Request a virtual meeting with flexibility
A meeting is crucial for building meaningful mentorship, so I wanted to make sure I made that flexible and accessible in Compass. Mentors can always set their availability for potential mentees to view, and for mentees, they can suggest a different option if nothing works out.
Mentor meetings focused on sharing
Career building is about gaining knowledge, so I wanted to ensure Compass's mentor meeting has the easiest and wide range of resource-sharing options. From images and video to voice notes and articles, the meeting with your mentor is about sharing what you know.
Process
Laying out assumptions
First, it was essential to lay down all my preexisting ideas and assumptions about high school students' career concerns. Then, I grouped these notes into an affinity map to discover which area I focused on most. The map confirmed that my questions focused on career planning and college admissions.
Insight interview
I drafted research questions based on the patterns formed by the affinity map. Then, I recruited 12 friends who went through high school in America and conducted interviews to understand the exact problem I wanted to solve.My interviews led to six essential principles that became the primary characteristics of Compass.
Four versions of the experience
The interview insights played a major role in creating four user flow diagrams. My original focus was to help high school students find mentors to prepare for college. However, the research revealed that it might be more helpful to focus on exploring possible career options before deciding on a college.The four versions of Compass explore different ways of discovering mentors, and I drew a flow diagram to capture the flow.
Journey map to converge on a final direction
The four wireframes created were tested with some of the interview participants. I tasked the participants to discover a potential mentor and send that person a request o meet.Participants responded the best when they could learn beyond just the resumè. For example, posts uploaded by mentors became a great resource to get a preview of what the mentorship will be. As a result, the final product direction focused on four main features.
Final design
