Talent Mentoring is a Pune based mentoring organization whose mission is to mentor global professionals, entrepreneurs, and students to develop their talent and achieve their dream.
INTERACTION DESIGNER
VISUAL RESEARCHER
1 MONTH
ADOBE XD
InVision WHITEBOARD
The government estimates that up to 176 million young people in India are in need of care and protection. Many of these students don’t have access to positive role models, cannot envision a career, and don’t feel connected to their communities. It is tragic that these young people are much more likely to be unemployed or live in poverty. Mentoring creates meaningful connections that can positively impact the lives of both mentor and mentee.
While Talent Mentoring has successfully created a mentoring platform, our challenge was to explore different ways we could expand the current website and make it easy to use. The main goal was to redesign the entire architecture while preserving the purpose of its existence.
The 3 primary areas of focus for our soultion
User Interview
Online Surveys
Competitive Analysis
We conducted a series of user interviews to gain a better understanding of how we could effectively address the problem.
Some of the interesting findings and statistics we gathered from our user surveys and interviews
After surveying 20 participants and conducting 5 user interviews, we used affinity mapping to find common themes in the data we collected. As a result of this activity, we were able to discover several major trends that we needed to address in the next phase of our design process.
We looked at the current Talent Mentorings’ website to determine their existing areas of focus and what could be improved to address both business and user needs. We found that overall the website had a outdated design and did not follow a content hierarchy. We identified several issues that might discourage an individual from getting involved including:
Screenshots of the current website
In order to visualize the current Talent Mentoring website experience from the user’s perspective, we created a user journey map. We wanted these journey maps to illustrate the potential scenarios where a user might interact with the Talent Mentoring website.
Enrollment descision making experience
To gain inspiration and identify best practices for our website redesign, we conducted a competitor analysis. We began by looking at the websites of several other mentoring websites including clarify.fm and brendon.com
brendon.com
clarity.fm
One common feature we identified across the websites was the client testimonials. This was an important feature to consider in order to make the program more reliable and trustworthy.
Once we organized all our research and defined our solution, we began to explore potential designs for the website.
After we defined the core functionalities that we needed to include in our solution, we created quick, low-fidelity, wireframes. Using these wireframes, we were able to conduct usability testing with 4 participants. This allowed us to gather some crucial feedback to help us decide what to include in the final experience before jumping into the next iteration of our design. Overall users had an easy time using the website, we just needed to address a few small issues with the navigation labeling and placement of the page titles. We completed a few rounds of iterations based on testing and feedback to ensure the wireframes included everything we needed. Once the functionality of our design was finalized, we moved on to designing the UI.
We redesigned the current Talent Mentoring website to provide individuals with more meaningful information about the mentoring program, Talent Mentorings’ mission, and programs. This would help establish trust and confidence in Talent Mentoring, increase awareness, and ultimately empower individuals to get involved.
Post and Blog
Registration Process
We redesigned Talent mentoring website using a mobile first approach. Most of the users access the website through the mobile phone, so using a mobile first approach caters the need of most of the users.
Moving forward with this project, I’d like to start looking at the bigger picture of how to get more mentors involved in Talent Mentoring. This includes exploring different offline methods to raise awareness for Talent Mentoring, and ultimately drive traffic to the Talent Mentoring website.
This project was a monumental learning experience for me in so many ways.I personally learned a lot about the process, collaboration, and working with mentoring organization. I also learned quite a bit about myself.
Compared to previous projects, this project was a lot more research heavy. I saw this as an opportunity to strengthen my research skills and get more involved in the process of learning about our users and their needs. Some of the methods and situations which I encountered for the first time were eye-opening and will be helpful to use moving forward in my design career.