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Research
I studied four kinds of potential users who have different relationships with mentorship: Student, Employee, active mentor, and proactive mentee. This was made to create the best possible experience for each persona.
The four personas the design serves
Scenarios
Three scenarios shaped the flow:
- The user is a mentee looking for mentors
- The user is a mentor looking for mentees
- The user is both a mentor and a mentee
User interviews
Highlights from four potential users — students, employees, active mentors, and proactive mentees:
“Uncertainty is frustrating.”
“I feel like driving on neutral. I wish to fulfill my potential.”
“I’m looking for someone I can trust.”
“I want to help them since I know what their difficulties are.”
Research
Synthesis
Themes that recurred across interviews — awareness, supervising productive relationships, and matchmaking — informed both the product surface and the matching algorithm.
Main problems and pain points
- Awareness — some people are unaware of mentorship as a concept and how it can benefit them. Students and juniors in particular don’t know people in their industry to ask.
- No discovery layer — there’s no easy way for mentees to find mentors (or vice versa) without an external organizer.
- Supervising productive relationships — monitoring whether the relationship is productive is hard. Mentees may want help for the wrong thing.
Today
How people find mentors now
In organizations: formal mentorship programs, new-hire programs, high-potential programs. Outside organizations: informal asks, social networks, paid platforms. None of these scale well.
Approach
Three matching strategies considered
Matching by committee — accurate but slow. Self-match through technology — fast but cold. Speed mentoring — sessions where mentors and mentees meet briefly to find chemistry. We layered all three.
The solution
The goal is to create a compelling and safe framework for mentor & mentee relationships. After collecting research, I set up user flows and wireframes.
Wireframes — discovery, request, session flow
Selected final screens
