CASE STUDY
Career Planning - Connectedness with the Tech industry
Project
Mentor-mentee networking app
Team Size
6 designers
Timeline
September - December 2022
Target User
Undergraduate and Graduate STEM students at UofT
My Role & Responsibilities
Assisted with Background Research and Analysis, Helped design the As-Is Scenario and Empathy Map, Designed a Lo-fi prototype and Evaluation, Interviewed 2 participants, Revised the Mid-fi prototype, Presented a Playback to industry experts
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This project focused on creating a solution for career planning for students looking for jobs in the Tech industry. This was implemented by creating an app called "connecTECH" that allows students and mentors to connect and create connections that will later help them during job hunting.
Research & Analysis
Ideation
Prototyping & Evaluation
Lessons Learned
Takeaways & Reflections
1. Research & Analysis
Problem Statement
The problem focuses on the UofT undergrad & Grad STEM students who are looking to enter the tech industry specifically, because we want to help “close to home”, and we’re narrowing it down to STEM & tech, because we thought that different industries have different networking needs.
User Research
To understand the connectedness of UofT STEM students with the Tech industry, we decided to use the method of Questionnaire & Semi-structured interviews to try to answer these overarching research questions.
We received a total of 23 survey responses and interviewed 4 participants in order to help us step into their shoes and empathize with them.
Important Findings
01. Cold Emails
When students were messaging industry professionals through email and Linkedin, they only got cold emails as a response.
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02. Connecting
They also had troubles in reaching out to industry professionals via linkedin and email.
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03. Networking
They also genuinely needed advance networking for career planning.
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Based on these important findings, we came up with a Persona...
Stella the STEM Student
"I really want to start building my network in advance, as I want to stay in touch with the 'real' working world early, but I'm not having much luck!"
Stella is a third year computer
science student at UofT
Driven and ambitious about connecting with tech industry professionals
Devotes time to contacting industry professionals, but efforts are not reciprocated
As a busy student, wishes that building connections was more efficient and less time-consuming
2. Ideation
Needs
Stella The STEM Student needs a way to
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01. Find an efficient method of communication in reaching out to industry professionals so that she knows she is reaching out to those who are willing to help
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02. Find tech professionals who are willing to mentor so that she can feel supported by someone with industry experience
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03. Quickly draft introductory messages so that she can move on from the initial contacting stage
Big Ideas
We came up with a bunch of ideas and used dot voting with the help of a prioritization grid to decide the feasibility and impact of each of our ideas.
There was one idea that hit the “home run” which means receiving most impact & feasibility votes.
connecTECH
A platform where students can look for mentors and give virtual "coffee" as "kudos" to industry mentors who helped them before.
Design Goals
01. UofT tech students can identify industry professionals who are willing to be mentors with a simple glance at their profiles
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02. UofT tech students can establish meaningful connections with industry professionals efficiently without back and forth messaging
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03. Tech professionals can mentor future tech industry newbies and feel recognized while building their own professional reputation within the industry
3. Prototyping & Evaluation
Low Fidelity Prototype
Selecting a Mentor
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After the user initially lands on a page with mentor profiles, first, they can select a domain to filter their searches.
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Second, users can refine their search again by typing in a specific job title or mentor name.
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Finally, users can select an individual mentor card and are taken to the mentor’s full profile. From here, users can pinpoint the“kudos” count as a visible metric for that industry person's previous mentorship.
Messaging a Mentor
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Here is the list of mentor profiles from our first task flow.
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Next, the user is able to skim the profile, including the kudos, and then select the “message’ button.
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The user can type out a message and send it to the mentor.
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Finally, the message is sent and, in the hopes that the kudos count was reliable, the mentor replies quickly.
Evaluation
Based on our lean evaluation results, we made the following changes to our medium-fidelity prototype...
Medium Fidelity Prototype
Sign in or Create Flow
Kudos Flow
Message Flow
Dashboard
Selecting a Mentor
Messaging a Mentor
Provide Kudos for Mentors
4. Lessons Learned
01. First, because our focus has been primarily on students so far, we want to begin exploring the needs of mentors as another user group and the ways they can benefit from using kudos.
02. Second, we want to consider adding even more features based on our evaluations, such as connecting the platform to Github in some way because it’s considered an important tool for aspiring tech professionals.
03. Lastly, a big limitation we realized from our participants is that the kudos function is very quantitative and may lead to certain mentors getting an overwhelming amount of exposure. In other words, if mentors with higher kudo counts are more visible especially through search filters, then every student would only be messaging those specific mentors. So now we’re starting to consider ways we can address this.
5. Takeaways & Reflections
01. Storytelling & Narrative
We had to prepare our sprint's worth of content within an 8 minute presentation for our industry experts from IBM and Google. With the content increasing with each sprint, I had to choose what to include and prioritize artifacts. As the audience was new each time, they had to be brought up to speed with the progress of the project. We used story telling and designed a narrative to piece together everything interesting.
02. Learning Together
I worked with a team of 5 other emerging UX Designers. We equally divided work in each sprint and diverged to get our parts done at a set internal deadline. Before the deadline, we would converge and work together as a team to finalize our sprint deliverables and work on the presentation.I also helped my team members with their parts of the tasks and I learnt to focus on the growth of the team.