After who and what to research, I began my initial research online and wrote down my findings on sticky notes. After that, I grouped similar findings and wrote a summary for them. By doing that, I created an affinity wall that has 3 level structures and 4 high-level themes that reflected my findings. By conducting an affinity wall, it helped me to analyze my findings and make sense of my research.

Key findings from the research:

• The mentors need to be trained and monitored.

• The mentees need to reflect on their goal and expectation of this mentorship.  

• Using social media and online resources to help students and mentors find each other.

• The mentorship needs to have a structure to help support the students.

• Students experienced social disconnect and academic problems when they came to the University.

Since the main features were already established as the 3 goals mentioned above, I quickly sketch down the user flow to understand and organize what the interaction flow will look like. After that, I began working on designing the wireframes using Sketch.

After several iterations of revision, this is what the final user flow looks like.

The reason why I used the bottom navigation with 3 tabs is that there were not many features in this application, using the 3 tabs navigation is perfectly enough. The 3 tabs are mentors/mentees, messages, and settings. These 3 tabs' functions are similar to any application's contacts, messages, and settings, so I won't go into details about them.

Instead, I will like to explain my notification page. I designed a notification page is because I will like to keep reminding my user that there is a new match. The user is also given the option to dismiss that notification because he might not be interested in finding new mentors or mentees at that time. However, I wanted to have this notification function is because this function helped my application to keep connecting with the user and reminding them to connect with his mentors or mentees.

Next, I'm going into details about how this application achieved the 3 goals.

To help the school to verify the user, the application will need the user to sign in using the school email. Once signed in, the application will check the user’s identification by matching with the school system and send a verification code to the user’s email. After the user input the verification code, the user will be brought to the setup page.

The purpose of doing that is to prevent someone who is not from the school to use this application and to help the application to identify if the person is mentee or mentor. Therefore, establish the trust and the credibility of this application.

The welcoming page was pretty straight forward; the user can decide to either answer the questionnaire first or later. The purpose of doing this is to let the user has the freedom to browse first. I am considering the situation where the user doesn’t want to find the mentor yet, or the user doesn’t have any questions. However, when they are browsing, there will be a banner indicates that answer the questionnaire can help the user to find mentors that match him.

If the user is a mentee, the questionnaire will be focusing on asking the user’s background, interest, career goal, and topics about campus life that the user is interested to learn. By answering the questionnaire, it helped the application to find the mentors that have a similar background, interest, and career goal. As well as matching the user with the mentors who know about topics that he is interested to learn.

If the user is a mentor, the questionnaire will also ask about the same user’s background, interest, and career goal. However, the user is allowed to write down their personal experience about something that is a must-experience for the new students. The user can decide to write it or not, but the application encourages the user to do so. Because it increases the opportunity for the user to get noticed by the mentees and help the application to find a specific match by adding a new option.

After the user completes the questionnaire, he will bring to a loading screen indicates that the application is processing. The purpose of doing that is to give the user feedback and communicate to him that the application is processing the request that he inputted.

The browsing page will look similar for both mentors and mentees. The page has 4 filters for the user to choose from. The user can choose between match, background, interest, and career goal. When filter by match, the best match will always be the first one on top. The only difference is the navigation will be different depending on what the user is looking for. If the user is a mentor look for mentees, the tab will be mentees. Otherwise, the user is a mentee looking for mentors; therefore, the tab will mentors.

When the user clicks on a specific mentor or mentee, it will show more information on that person. If the user is a mentee, he will be able to see how good of a match they are, what is the mentor' s personal suggestion on what is a must-experience for the new students, what they have in common, and how the mentor can help him to adjust to campus life. If the user is a mentor, he will be able to see how good of a match they are, what do the mentee needs to help on, and what they have in common. This information is designed for the user to quickly understand what to ask and how to reach out to their mentors or mentees.

If the user wants to reach out to the mentors or mentees, the user can always message the person on this application. The purpose of the message function is for the user to be able to start a conversation. Therefore, it helps improve communication between mentors and mentees. On top of that, it also helps to facilitate the building of a personal relationship between them.

This is the final version of the high-fidelity digital mockups. To be able to create these hi-fi mockups, I was using Sketch and Google’s Material Theme Editor Plugin. The purpose of these hi-fi mockups is to be able to covey my research to the users and build unity within the application.

The color theme that I choose helped me to bring a message to the users. The purpose of using these three colors was that I wanted to let the user have a lively and hearty impression when they are using my application and hopefully encourage them to connect with their mentors or mentees.

I won’t be able to create my high-fidelity mockups without using the design system. The design system helped me to bring unity and organization to the whole design.

Instead of the usual text input and multiple choice selections for the onboarding process, it might be useful to implement a voice-recognition system. It can help the users to express who they are, what they are looking forward to the college experience, and what characteristics they are looking for a mentor/mentee. Voice recognition allows the users to express themselves and not limit them in the pre-select questions. It will also help the application to understand more about the users.