Our product is an app called Mentorite that aims to reduce barriers to entry for higher education. Mentorite sends all students in the universe to university.
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Designed for University of California Irvine's 2023 "You Belong Here" Virtual Designathon.
Overview.
Context
My team and I competed in the University of California Irvine's 2023 "You Belong Here" Virtual Designathon. We were challenged to design a high-fidelity prototype in 60 hours for its design challenge:
Design your own digital application that fosters community and celebrates inclusivity.
Our Goal
Creating a resource to help people find community colleges in their area, explore programs of study, and be guided through the matriculation process through mentorship.
Team Members
Janhavi Shah
Jasmine Mendoza
Jennifer Woo
Lindsay Hertzberg
Role
Product Designer
User Researcher
Project Length
60 hours (Remote)
Tools Used
Figma
Adobe Illustrator
Google Forms
Methods
Ethnography
User Interviews
Product Research
Affinity Mapping
Journey Mapping
Prototyping
User Research.
My team and I had all taken several different paths in life and felt that it was necessary to look into how people feel about higher education. We decided to send out a survey to students from community colleges, 4-year universities, and the other participants at the UCI Design-a-thon. We had a total of 41 responses.
Result Summary
1. A high percentage of respondents said it was difficult for them to find resources on higher education. On a scale of 1-5, 1 being "very difficult" and 5 being "very easy," 78% answered in the range of 1 to 3.
2. Several respondents also said that they did not feel financially secure enough to attend college. On an agreement scale of 1-5, 1 being "strongly disagree" and 5 being "strongly agree," 61% answered in the range of 1 to 3.
Key Insights
After gathering our survey results, we listed 4 important findings. These were things we needed to include in our product no matter what. Here’s what we established after discussing our survey results:
User Persona
To better understand our users…
We created a persona named Joni who reflects the findings within our initial user research.
How can our solution help someone like Joni?
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Providing a resource to access information about schools and majors
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Peer help/ pairing systems to accommodate needs
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Easily access scholarships and keep up with deadlines
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Ability to choose when they want to use the app
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Schedule meetings with mentors to create a support system
Wireframes.
User Flow Mapping
We created a user flow to map out the user journeys starting from the home page, and into the different categories within the navigation bar. This helps us move on to creating wireframes and determining the path we need to take while designing.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
After creating the user flow, we created some low-fidelity wireframes after quick sketches to begin visualizing the wireframes. Since we had a very short amount of time to work, we took several short-cuts to be as efficient as possible.
User Interface Style Guide
Once we had a theme planned, we looked into stylistic choices that we wanted to take. I took up the sole responsibility of designing the logo. Here is some of the brainstorming process of the branding for Mentorite.
