Matchme: A platform to find your mentor
This is the documentation of a 3-day design sprint aiming to build a platform for people to Solve the challenge of Busy Schedules and Finding Suitable Mentors/Mentees.
Problem Statement 📌
Mentoring can be a great way to share knowledge and help someone be successful in their personal or professional life. How might we create a platform that facilitates meaningful mentorship relationships, even for those who have busy schedules or struggle to find a suitable mentor/mentee match? Design an experience where prospective mentors and mentees can be matched, based on similar interests, location, and availability.
Research 🤖
I conducted a user survey to gain user insights before forming any hypothesis to move forward; it was a six-question survey. I posted it on various social media platforms and ultimately received 20 responses.
Once I got the above results, I decided to take short interviews and talk to my friends and my seniors who are already struggling due to the recession in the market to have a good idea about what kind of problems people are facing and since there are already some apps in the market, why ain’t they helpful enough.
Problems with Existing Apps
With so many platforms already in the space, what’s wrong with them? Why are so many people still unable to get the match with their mentors?
Let's understand these problems with real-life user scenarios:
Working on the Challenges🎬
1. Loss aversion for new mentees
The first objective mentees have is to find an appropriate mentor with availability to help them solve their problems/doubts, hence asking mentees to sign up and complete their profile before even ensuring that they will find someone who might make users fall off from the app.
First letting them decide on the mentor and check their availability will give them a sense of ownership, and they will happily signup to complete their booking with their respective mentor
2. Saving cognitive effort to choose a mentor
While having any doubt, sometimes it's difficult to funnel our thoughts down to a set of categories (because that’s not how our mental model works). Simultaneously, sometimes we have so many choices that we often want to rely on others and waste a lot of time (Paradox of choices).
To save the cognitive efforts and time spent by the mentee to find the perfect mentor for them, we can allow them to state their thoughts and let MatchMe find the perfect match for their problem. And other edge cases as well when a mentee needs a mentor as soon as possible.
Assumption: MatchMe can efficiently act as a language model to understand the problem of the mentee, further can use Artificial Intelligence to help them find their perfect match
3. Notify users when their favourite mentor has free slots
Sometimes a mentee and a mentor start sharing a special bond; however sometimes, it gets tough for a mentee to get a slot booked with a top mentor hence providing an option to notify their favourite mentors will let them book the session ASAP.
4. Avoid time clashes from the mentor side
To make sure that mentors don’t miss the scheduled session because of misunderstandings clash with their other engagements, we can connect mentor’s Calendly/Outlook/Google Calendar so that not just mentors can keep track of their other engagements but also before booking their calendar; they would know if they have scheduled a session with a mentee.
5. Keeping Track of upcoming session
Although the session confirmation and meeting links are mailed to mentees and mentors, Gmail is not one of the most used apps in our daily lives, and users often forget about the scheduled session and do not appear in the session.
Integrating the upcoming session details with a more often-used app like Whatsapp can help users to remind users.
I. Reminder message at the start of the day
II. Follow-up message 10 mins before the session
Although this might be redundant for some users, it can be turned off manually via the app.
6. Stay connected after a session
It’s not necessary that one would need a whole session every time to clear their doubt or continue their conversation after one session; it might take just a few texts or opinions from a mentor to solve it.
Hence starting a thread after a successful session can solve many problems at the mentee’s end, and even a mentor can help their mentees without cutting a considerate chunk of time from their busy schedule.
7. Recalling the previous session for the next session
A mentor deals with multiple mentees at a time, and remembering an exact conversation with the respective mentee is extremely tough for the mentors; hence even in a short session of 30 mins, they spend considerable time recalling their past conversations.
To solve this and save hundreds of hours at the mentor’s end, and further let them utilise it for other important questions that a mentee has, we can do the following:
I. Review their conversation in the thread from previous session
II. Ask mentee to drop a note to share topic of the session
Final User Journey 🗺️
Final User Interfaces 🎯
With all the above brain-storming, there were so many ideas in my mind for the Interface part and deciding which screens I would present was a tedious task because the whole idea seemed so good.
Click here to view Figma prototype:
1. Explore Mentors
2. Search for Mentors
3. Mentor’s Profile
Summary 📝
Mentors are very important in our lives; they not just help us move forward and go in the right direction but also have their own life to manage, and doing all this together is indeed a tough task. During these three days, my overall approach was to take learnings from the daily lives of mentors and mentees and how that activity will affect the use of MatchMe.
Ending Notes🤞
This 3-day project was fun and pushed me to learn more about the user approach, mindset, and psychology behind the online sessions. However, due to the time-bound, there may be flaws and cases that I might’ve missed. I would love to discuss it further and make any improvements possible.
