Facilitating Mentorship Opportunities for Student Entrepreneurs through a Digital Platform

A UX case study of a rapid prototyping project for a nonprofit organization that helps students strategize and execute ideas to solve global challenges.

OptiMize is a non-profit organization affiliated with the University of Michigan whose mission is to empower students of all ages and backgrounds to ideate and execute entrepreneurial projects that make the world more just and sustainable. To streamline support for students and encourage collaboration across their network, OptiMize enlisted the help of my class to build a prototype for an app with a home screen, directory, and separate feature that facilitates the mentor-mentee relationship between students and potential and/or existing mentors.

Almost all interviewees expressed hesitation reaching out to potential mentors for fear of being an unneeded burden.

To reduce the fear of rejection that accompanies many individuals seeking mentorship opportunities, I looked to build a feature that would enhance transparency and manage expectations for both the mentor and mentee by reflecting each party’s availability.

Interviewees reported that mentor-mentee relationships are strongest when both parties take an interest in the other’s life outside of work/school.

Another pattern I kept hearing throughout my interviews was that organically-fostered relationships between mentors and mentees tend to produce the best outcomes on both ends. This is easiest achieved when the two parties can connect on a personal level on topics outside of work or school, such as shared hobbies or backgrounds. Thus, I looked to incorporate a humanistic element to my designs.

How a mentee capitalizes on the mentor-mentee relationship is heavily dependent on what stage that person is in his/her career or project.

My research also showed that people seek mentorship opportunities for different reasons and with varying commitment levels. To allow for the broadest use case among OptiMize’s members, I wanted to create a simple and widely-applicable feature that would complement the app’s existing directory function.

Respondents said they felt most comfortable reaching out to potential mentors with whom they already had an established connection or relationship.

Understandably, I found that people are especially hesitant to reach out to potential mentors without a prior introduction or connection to facilitate the interaction. Because of this, I looked to include an element that would allow OptiMize users to leverage existing connections in their network.

People’s understanding of the definition and scope of mentorship varies.

My interviewees responded differently to the word ‘mentorship’ and some provided information irrelevant to my research by expanding or narrowing the scope of my questions, prompting me to clarify my questions or probe further. Thus, I tried to avoid the term in the context of my designs.

The first step in my design process was synthesizing my research to inform a mentorship feature for OptiMize’s community hub app. Based on the gaps revealed through my user interviews, I decided to focus my attention on facilitating the initial mentor-mentee interaction, since almost all of my interviewees expressed this as one of the biggest hurdles in forming this relationship.

Because the client had already decided to build a directory as a component of their app, I wanted to augment this functionality for my mentorship feature and design an interface that would allow users to curate a personal contact list tailored to their specific needs.

I first created a high-level user flow mapping out how a user would walk through the app to find my feature.

Building on this process, I created further iterations of my design though sketches and wireframes to help me understand how a user might interact with my feature, culminating in a paper prototype that I shared with peers and refined after receiving feedback.

Posted below are a few frames of the final low-fidelity prototype of my feature.

My goal in creating this feature was to help student entrepreneurs feel empowered to reach out to potential mentors in OptiMize’s community network and for mentors to gain leadership opportunities by connecting with these students. Many observations from my user research helped to inform my ultimate design decisions, which prioritizes simplicity, transparency, and application for a variety of use cases.

Because many of my interviewees mentioned a fear of being a burden or getting rejected from potential mentees, my feature displays a status indicator of the mentor’s availability and how many people that person is currently advising. It also allows participants to refer contacts to others, since some of my interviewees expressed that they are less likely to reach out unless they have an established connection already. Furthermore, this feature allows users to personalize their profiles with a bio or fun fact to help humanize the process and encourage communication between mentors and mentees.

Lastly, I made an intentional choice to refrain from including the words ‘mentor’ and ‘mentee’ on the app. I found that those I interviewed were thrown by the word and would either widen or constrain the scope of my research question. I wanted to mitigate confusion regarding the purpose and application of this feature to ensure that the app’s use case would encompass students’ needs, whether that be long-term mentorship opportunities or ad-hoc advice seekers.

See a quick video of my final prototype in Balsamiq below:

If I miraculously find the time to continue iterating on my designs, I would continue to test out the low-fidelity prototype and build a high-fidelity prototype for further testing and tweaking. Using a higher-fidelity model, I would conduct A/B user testing of my feature against a swiping-dependent dating app interface to assess whether my assumption that users would not prefer this model is correct.

Based on my finding that people have different definitions for the word ‘mentorship,’ I’d like to test out whether ‘adviser’ may be a more or less appropriate term by performing A/B user testing and gathering usage statistics on how the app is used.

Lastly, I would investigate how to incentivize mentor recruitment and retainment. I aligned my user research and designs more closely with what I perceived would motivate mentees more so than mentors, however, I understand that the success of the feature hinges on how engaged mentors are with the app as much as, if not more than, the mentees.

The finished app will foster collaboration and mentorship within OptiMize’s community network and allow students at the University of Michigan and beyond to harness their entrepreneurial potential.

Thanks for reading!

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