Skills: Literature Review, Competitive Analysis, In-Depth Interviews, Survey Design, Qualitative Analysis, Usability Testing, Collaboration
Top Lessons Learned:
While remote work offers flexibility, building strong mentorship connections can be a challenge. Our team set out to research, design, test, and iterate on a solution for the prompt we were given to us by our sponsors, during the Winter and Spring quarters.
How might we better foster mentoring connections and delivery in a remote environment?
Before narrowing down our project focus, we wanted to gain a high-level understanding of mentorship and answer questions such as:
I created a shortened visual literature review not only due to an extremely short time frame, but so so our designers could more easily access all of the findings (instead of reading a 20 page paper)
Through our competitive analysis we found that Google and LinkedIn build strong mentorship culture by engaging participation with leadership and mentors/mentees get recognition for their efforts. Additionally, more mentor programs are using AI-powered matching algorithms
The literature review I conducted identified numerous potential areas for improvement in the mentoring experience. However, tackling them all within a single project was unrealistic.
To prioritize effectively, we narrowed down the issues by generating 20 "how might we" questions (e.g., "How might we improve the mentor matching process?"). These questions were placed on a prioritization matrix that measured feasibility and user value (shown here), followed by a round of voting based on our personal interests.
Given the research emphasis on the critical role of initial stages in successful mentoring relationships, we decided to concentrate our efforts on that specific phase
Following our prioritization exercise, our main research question became:
How can we facilitate strong personal connection and trust through meaningful dialogue during the beginning stages of a mentoring relationship?
Sub research questions:
Many of our interview findings successfully triangulated the findings from my literature review.
At this point we came to a crossroads - our initial research question and design intent had been to focus on trying to build stronger remote mentoring relationships more quickly and easily. However, our research participants overwhelming shared they felt like personal connection and trust were most quickly and easily built through good mentoring matches, and it was difficult for many people to find good mentor matches.
We decided, after discussing with our stakeholders and other mentors, to follow what the research insights were revealing and to potentially include the mentor matching phase in our design.
As a team, we each developed rough feature concepts through a crazy eights design exercise, which we shared and voted on with each other. We developed 3 concepts which our designers shared with potential users in concept testing. From that testing, we created a final concept using various parts of each concept focusing on the following insights:
My teammate Connie and I conducted usability testing with 7 participants. We recruited from our previous participant pool, by posting on Slack, and having our sponsors share our recruitment screener.
Due to the speed at which we needed to deliver our results to the designers, we created a more visual version of our affinity diagram, seen below. This included screenshots and usability issue callouts, participant quotes or notes, and design recommendations, along with metrics such as our single ease questionnaire, task success, and SUS.
Our initial overview of usability findings
The Insight
Participants expressed a desire for improved mentor matching, particularly those seeking mentors within specific demographics or areas of interest (e.g., women in tech, individuals with disabilities, etc).
The Design Solution
The Insight
Mentees expressed uncertainty about initiating conversations with mentors, creating goals, and structuring meetings with their mentors.
The Design Solution
The Insight
Both mentors and mentees shared that mentoring is important at Microsoft as it is a part of their Connect, a performance review system. They also shared they wanted to receive mentoring in order to better understand Microsofts corporate culture, so they could get promoted.
The Design Solution
We're proud to have delivered a core product that empowers Microsoft employees to find their ideal mentor matches, streamlines goal and agenda creation, and facilitates ongoing mentoring relationships through a dedicated living document – all within the constraints of the project timeline. However, with additional time, we'd be eager to pursue further development in these areas:
Future Research
Future Design
1. Although this project was sponsored by Microsoft, it was not tied to a particular product, vision, or business goal, which slowed down our project, and limited our access to internal Microsoft resources that could have been very helpful. This was found at every step of the way:
2. The problem our final solution addressed had a much larger scope than we initially anticipated, and the short time frame was not enough to conduct thorough iteration cycles. Though we conducted one round of usability testing, some of the changes we made following those tests were fairly significant, and further research could be beneficial.
3. We also left the mentor path of the platform completely undesigned. We decided early on that we wanted to design something practical that could be easily implemented at Microsoft to suit their employees mentorship needs. Though this ensured a feasible solution to fit user needs, it’s worth considering if our design requirements constrained our creativity, and there may be room to explore more creative approaches to mentoring in the future.
I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have collaborated with such a fantastic team and our sponsors at Microsoft. This project was ambitious and presented us with unforeseen challenges, but through it all, we functioned as a truly cohesive unit. Even when disagreements arose, we fostered a culture of respectful dialogue, leading to shared understanding and effective compromises.