In 2020, I applied to be a UI/UX intern at Google. This was my response to their Google Design Challenge that year.
Illustrator, Adobe Xd, Google Slides
UI/UX Designer, UX Researcher
January 2020, 1 week
“Your school wants to strengthen the community by encouraging experienced students to connect with new students and help them adjust to campus life. Design an experience that allows mentors and mentees to discover each other. Consider the needs of both mentors and mentees, including how someone may become a mentor and how to connect mentors to mentees.”
1. Receive challenge statement
2. Create product concept to answer challenge statement
3. Conduct user surveys
4. Develop personas and context scenarios
5. Create a medium-fidelity prototype
6. Test medium-fidelity prototype
7. Create a high-fidelity prototype based off feedback
8. Present final prototype
In order to understand the problem space, I sent out a survey to students of various universities. I wanted to know if university students would even want such a mentor-mentee matching product. If so, what would their specific needs and expectations be for it?
Based on my 9 responses, students felt that being mentored by a senior student would have positively impacted their social and academic transition from high school. From their responses, I was able to identity these distinct problems:
• Students were unsure what the exact benefits of having a mentor were
• Students were unsure how to find a mentor
• Of those who were aware of existing mentorship services, students felt there was a lack of incentive to use those resources
• Students were wary of building relationships with others based solely on giving or receiving advice
From my research, I realized this platform had two stakeholders to design for: mentors and mentees. To address the concerns brought out by the initial survey, I included chat, scheduling, matching, and profile customization features in the app.
Because some of those surveyed wished to establish friendlier relationships beyond that of mentor-mentee, I designed the chat, matching, and profile customization features to help mentors and mentees match based on similar hobbies, interests, majors, and career goals.
Based on the insights gained from my initial survey, I created a persona and context scenario for a mentee to create an overarching reference for user needs and goals.
Once I finished compiling my research through the affinity mapping method, I created a medium-fidelity interactive prototype of the app.
To analyze the efficacy of my prototype design, I asked 3 users (2 university students and 1 HCI professor) to test my product.
For my user testing protocol, here are the tasks I requested my users to complete:
1. You have recently downloaded the Coffee Chat app and have just launched it on your phone
2. Please register and create an account for the app so that you can start connecting with other students at your university as mentors/mentees
3. You are interested in becoming a mentor. Please navigate to where you would apply for the position
4. Please select a student you would like to be mentored by and begin a chat with them
5. Please schedule a coffee chat with mentor Shirley at 3:00 pm on February 18
From my user testing, I found that:
• The chat feature was difficult to find
• Users were unclear which dates mentors were available
• Users felt uncomfortable with disclosing their ability statuses
The prototype was fairly colorless and flat. This led to some important iconography and information being difficult to find, since they blended in with the rest of the prototype’s interface design.
There was also concern regarding an invasive onboarding question. My preconceptions of accessibility needs led me to include a question during the onboarding process which asked users to disclose their disability status. I added this on the presumption that students might want to connect with others who shared their same ability status to aid in their adjustment to campus life. However, this section was looked upon unfavorably: 2 testers felt ambivalent and 1 was very uncomfortable with its inclusion. I ultimately decided not to include this onboarding question in the high-fidelity prototype.
“The mobile application, Coffee Chat, allows students to match up as mentors and mentees in order to foster friendly relationships around the giving and receiving of academic, professional, and social advice.”
All the colors used in the palette were carefully selected to ensure they would pass the WebAIM contrast check for their specific purposes and use cases.
I definitely had room for improvement regarding my survey design. There was one question intended only for people who had neither mentor nor mentee experience. However, everyone answered that question when 3 out of 9 participants should not have. In the future, I might consider bolding certain text in order to make survey requirements more immediately visible.
Overall, this design challenge taught me how to gather informative feedback to iterate on, and how to continuously solve problems that pop up during testing phases.
If I were to continue this project, I would test my high-fidelity prototype with a larger, more diverse set of users to ensure inclusivity. For example, I didn’t account for the potentially different needs of the international and exchange student population. With that in mind, I would want to interview that demographic of university students to integrate their needs into the next iteration of Coffee Chat.
