Client Project with Silver Lining Mentoring (2024)

Boosting engagement and communication in mentorships for the foster care community

Timeline
May - Aug 2024
(16 weeks)

Team
1 Design Manager
1 Product Manager
5 Designers (Me)

Outcome
end-to-end design and documentation, 100% client satisfaction and contracts Develop for Good engineers to ship the product

00 Overview

Context

Scaling the in-person mentoring experience to serve 3000+ mentors and mentees online

Silver Lining Mentoring is a non-profit organization that matches volunteer mentors with mentees in the foster care system. Winter of 2024, SLM plans to launch an e-mentoring program. As a product design volunteer, I researched and design the core user experience of online mentoring.

thumbnail and logo :)

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

A mobile activities hub for matches to deepen their bond and practice relationship skills

Complete Engage Challenges

Share specific growth and obstacle

Discover Shared Hobbies

Initiate meaningful conversations

Solution Highlights

An engagement hub with various activities for matches to interact with each other

I created a dashboard where users can quickly access features like prompts, shared hobbies, and kudos - cute motivational messages for their mentor/mentee.

Users receives instant notification when their match complete a task and can track all past activities.

Initiate deep and fun conversations exclusively with your mentor

Mentees need casual and asynchronous ways to have meaningful conversations with their mentors.

Prompts make space for conversations that fit into mismatched schedules

Gamified challenges to reinforce mentoring themes and boost long-term engagement

One key stakeholder goal is to reinforce mentorship themes like identity development, life skills, and community responsibility.
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An engage challenge helps pairs work on specific themes while varying patterns of engagement

01 User and Stakeholder Research

User Research

Identifying potential problems and opportunities

As SLM plans to launch its inaugural e-mentoring program, we needed to understand how the organization currently solves its problems, the problems it anticipates, and how it plans to solve them.

User Persona

Understanding who we are designing for and working with

Through user research, we gained insights into the 3 parties involved in the mentorship ecosystem at SLM:

User Research Key Insights

1. Engagement is the biggest anticipated issue with e-mentoring

The biggest issue facing in-person matches is engagement and communications in the early stages. Attempts to communicate can be challenging leading to matches falling out of touch.

🎙️ “Mentors often come to me saying they can’t reach the mentee... I think this might be a bigger issue in online mentoring, especially with the memory of COVID”
-- Past mentor and now coordinator

2. Administrative documentation is required, but not helpful

SLM coordinators are required to document all of their interactions with matches. The information comes from everywhere - email, text, phone call - and takes a lot of time.

🎙️ "It's just a lot of paper work and it feels repetitive. I copy emails, transcribe phone calls, and upload documents." -- SLM coordinator

Scope and constraints

Supplementing, rather than replacing, the existing ecosystem

As we learned through talking to users and stakeholders, a majority of e-mentoring’s daily functioning will already be fulfilled by existing messaging and education apps. Our constraint is to NOT duplicate these features 👉

Narrowing down

Narrowing down over 70+ ideated solutions and finding priorities

Feasibility: How difficult will this be for developers to build?
Desirability: Does the feature solve an existing need that is not already solved?
Viability: How difficult will this feature be for a small non-profit to maintain?

Mid-Fi Wireframes

🚗 Journey: documenting memories to visualize growth

Repurposing admin documentation and SLM's existing mentorship tier system into a shared digital journal between mentor and mentee, the journal feature allows mentees to visualize growth.

👥 Community: celebrate resilience and connect with others

Community serves a forum where mentees can share their milestones and reflections, we introduce tags to help users discover announcements and browse specific topics like education, finance, and housing.

🪪 Profile: Send quick nudges and edit privacy settings

Through profile, users send quick emojis to each other, which serves as a quick check-in message between mentor and mentee.

🎧 Engage: Stay engaged through activities and goal-tracking

Here, users can track the status of the goals they set through each phase of the mentorship program, and complete activities that help move towards those goals.

03 Feature Deep Dive: Engagement

The Pivot

The "Engage" feature (my scope) was not very engaging...

Initial designs of the Engage feature (my scope), received negative feedback from stakeholders as the feature duplicated SLM's existing goal-based curriculum, adding no additional value. I realized that I needed to dive deeper into the user research to gather more insights.

💭 Receiving and addressing negative stakeholder feedback

In this section, I will focus on how addressed initial dissatisfaction by realigning on user needs and use cases in a short amount of time.

Evaluative User Research

Understanding the "why" behind low engagement through critical user journey mapping

Because I was short on time and resources to conduct another round of user research, I focused on mapping the current user journey to understand what pieces I might be missing.

I collected and synthesized multiple sources of data and gathered 2 pieces of valuable insight:

1. Themed conversations deepen the mentoring relationship

Or, why text messages are not helpful. Guided discussions help pairs discuss topics that are meaningful for growth.

2. Mentees value flexibility and boundaries in a new relationship

Because mentors and mentees have busy lives, it's important to also create asynchronous modes of connection.

How Might We, Redefined

How might we build rapport and relationship growth through flexible and interactive channels of communication?

04 Design Iterations

Design Decision #1

Prompts: Exchange Ideas and Experiences on Themed Topics

Prompts make up the core of the engage feature. In a mutual Q&A format, prompts are flexible and meaningful ways to start and look back on conversations. Prompts are supplied by SLM to best fit their curriculum themes.

Design Decision #2

Share vs. Respond to a Prompt:
designing for multiple user actions

A stakeholder provided feedback that the user should be able to initiate or share a prompt without having to answer it first; this creates a more organic and conversational feel. I iterated on how a user chooses between "share vs. respond":

Design Decision #3

Select and Browse Prompts

In order to prioritize engagement, I used a "feed" pattern to organize recent prompts and activities his allows users to stay updated on new activities from their mentor/mentee. A prominent prompt selection section is featured at the middle of the screen.

05 Hand-off, feedback, and reflection

Design Hand-off

Handing off to external engineers through prototypes and annotations

Handing this project off to external engineers, it’s crucial that I explain the details of the design. In the hand-off doc, I explained how different screens and modular elements fit together across numerous flows:

Client Feedback and impact

Lots of love for our project from company CEO and board

We presented our project to company CEOs and board members - they loved it! The app is rolling out in 2025 for SLM's e-mentoring program.

Opening conversations about designing for the younger generation

We all hope to inspire other EdTech apps that rethink social media and relationship management for young people.