A responsive web app connecting mentees with mentors to improve the recruitment, retention, and success of women in STEM
STEM Muse is a mentorship program that connects female-identifying students with women more advanced in their careers to improve the recruitment, retention, and success of women in STEM.
STEM Muse wants to scale their mentor-matching program through paid mentor sponsorships that will allow companies to reach potential talent (mentees).
In order to scale their startup, STEM Muse needs a web application that allows mentees to match mentors with a high success rate and track the results of their mentorship meetings.
Sophie Sanchez and Damla Cinoglu are PhD students at the University of Texas at Austin.
Sophie identified a need for female students in STEM fields to be better connected to mentors because they are currently isolated in their degree programs and unaware of career options outside of medicine and academia. Sophie founded a student group, Sages, at UT-Austin that offered a mentee-driven mentorship matching program that has been incredibly successful. STEM Muse will scale that model to enhance the recruitment, retention, and success of women in STEM more broadly.
User interviews uncovered two primary personas, Mentee Megan and Mentor Michelle,and valuable insights about their current user experience.
Mentees are matching with mentors they aren’t fully compatible with in terms of reaching their professional goals
How might we enable mentees to make the most educated decisions when submitting their mentor match preferences?
Mentors struggle to keep track of meeting and events and dates
How might we centralize all relevant mentee/mentor information and news about upcoming events?
Independent sketches of an MVP user flow led us to combine some ideas and compromise others in order to design the most efficient and purposeful product.
The initial design was not intuitive, which led to rounds of usability testing and design iterations.
Before building our hi fidelity prototype we worked with our client on finalized brand guidelines. Below is a snapshot from our component library.
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We recommended that our clients address next steps in three phases, laid out here:
I recently re-contracted with STEM Muse to carry out the work detailed in Phase 1 Cont. so they can launch the product with full accessibility for both mentees and mentors using their service.
What I learned: I learned during this project, my first client project, that I love UX design in practice! It was great working with a design team of varied strengths and learning when to compromise my ideas and when to defend them. I also learned (the hard way) the value of UI component libraries and auto-layout for consistency throughout the project.
What I'd do differently next time: I think for a first client project it made sense to all pitch in every step of the process but in the future I might work with a design team to identify strengths and communally assign "leads" on different parts of the process to boost efficiency.