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UI/UX DESIGN | RESEARCH

M & M is a platform for international students to build the connection between mentor and mentee. It focuses on helping new students get used to new college life easily and quickly.

Overview

👤️ Who
New International Students

❓️Why
Frustrated with uncertainty school life

🛠️ What
A platform with comprehensive informations and can connect with newly and seniors to help each other

📄️ Delivery
UI/UX Design, Service Design, Prototype

Problem Statement

How to build a knowledge and experience sharing community to decrease the frustration and uncertainty of international new students and help them adapt to college life as smoothly as possible?

Goals

Solution

Design Process

Contextual Inquiry

To gain the basic understanding and general sense of newly-admitted students’ feelings, imagination, and expectations about college life before and after it started, I interviewed some freshmen. The following are two summarized stories to synthesize the key emotional changing moments I captured in the interviews.

Before Orientation

Imagine you finally get an offer from your dream college, what's your emotion at that moment? Excited! Then? You probably will start to get curious and nervous about the excited campus life. You will try to search for information about the school as much as you can, such as culture, events, current students feedback, etc. However, you may still feel disconnected since the search results can barely provide you a holistic view of the campus life. For example, it is challenging to find out what a regular day in college looks like, from the moment you open up your eyes in the morning till the moment you go to bed in the evening. Thus, how can newly admitted students get the primary materials of the expected college life?

Orientation week

You go to school with excitement and uncertainty, trying to utilize every second to learn about your college, major, and professors. You participate in various welcome events that are hosted by different organizations. However, it will likely take you a lot of energy and make you feel exhausted.

Market Analysis

To understand the gaps and opportunities in the current market, I did some simple market analysis, mainly focusing on:

What are the functionalities and experience of the current solutions?
How the current solutions help solve the challenges?

I found that:

The market already provides a lot of solutions to help students connect with each other. However, it is difficult to consolidate the connections;
There are many ways to search for school information. However, they are either inefficiently or lack of details;
New student (mentee) feels less confident about who is the right person (mentor) to connect with and may waste a lot of time to figure it out.

User Research

Interview & Affinity mapping

I conducted some quick user interviews before diving into solutions to better understand the mindset of mentors and mentees. I used affinity mapping sessions to brainstorm solutions based on my research findings.

I interviewed 7 mentees (new students) and 3 mentors (experienced students) to learn about their behavior and motivation. The followings are key insights:

For mentees:

They prefer to find experienced students who have similar backgrounds, such as hobbies, goals and so on.
Although they have made some connections online, they still feel a lack of help when they have questions or encounter problems.
The most efficient connections happened in offline events.
They prefer to explore campus life with other new students instead of with mentors.
The way to acquire useful information is limited. They can't easily find enough information to help them make decisions.

For mentors:

They participated in mentoring activities because they want to share their past experience and learned lessons with new students.
They have been helped by experienced students before so they are willing to take the responsibility to help new students.
They hope to get some incentives for their contributions, such as credits, benefits , etc.
They sometimes feel stressed in a 1:1 mentorship as they are not sure about the responsibility.

Because of the difficulties, experienced students feel challenging to be mentors to help new students. While for new students, they have a hard time finding experienced students to learn about campus life easily and quickly.

Journey Map

Personas

To better guide my following design, I further synthesized the interview results and came up with the following personas:

Ideation

Userflow

Information Architecture

Prototype

0.0 Signup

1.0 Landing Page

2.0 Explore event

3.0 Forum

4.0 Others

Iteration

I did the usability tests with 3 students, based on a task which is help them to build a connection with mentors quicker. They gave me some feedback to let me refine my design.

* Add mentor's icon to help student to connect easier

* Revise the calendar layout to help student to manage schedule

* Attendee list ranking based on matching score

Interaction

Next Steps

🤖️ Chatbot to "answer" general questions

AI Chatbot to answer general questions from new students to relieve the chatting load of experienced students.

🔄 Credit Strategy

For stimulating experienced students to register as mentors, a credit system can assist in the operation of the platform.

🔗 Management

School needs to put effort to maintain this platform, such as recruit official experienced students to help new students first.

📣 Promotion

Through the official channels to let students know this platform from experienced students to new students.

📧️ Learn more about the project details. Please reach out to me at haokunw1@gmail.com.