Website
8 weeks
Structured interviews
Research synthesis
User interface design
Dongming Liu
Eric Chen
Tsahao Yu
Summer 2022
ORCAS is an online platform for UX beginners to foster meaningful mentorship and support in their journey. The platform is specifically designed for the Master of Human-Computer Interaction + Design program at the University of Washington and recognized by the program advisor for great praise.
My inspiration for this mentorship topic began as we looked toward finishing this program and entering (or re-entering) the workforce. Thinking back on the program, we found that the mentorship program benefits us. Through this lens, we discussed how students in finding suitable mentors and how the existing mentorship program works. This brought us to investigate the mentorship experience for the students (especially those who change their majors or careers) and advisors in the program.
Orcas are honing in on concepts of story and resonance. This platform can help them understand their strengths and what's important to them during their initial journey in UX. A place for students to understand they are not alone!
I primarily focus on career changers as the target users. According to LinkedIn, Talent Insights UX Design has boomed over the past five years and has grown by 22% year over year, meaning there is much more new talent involved in this industry.
Career changers have more concerns and needs than others, and those concerns and needs might easily be overlooked by those with a traditional design background. They need more guidance. Focus on this group of people can help me to bring more value to the mentorship experience.
Furthermore, since we chose the program as our experiment place, we also found that a lot of students from current or previous cohorts shifted their careers or majors.
The MHCI+D is a diverse background program due to the multidisciplinary nature of the User Experience field. In this program, 58% of our cohort members joined the program without any UX background, and they come from linguistics, Engineering, Journalism, Law, Architecture, etc. During their career/ background changes moments, they struggled and experienced more than students from a design-related background.
To get to the root of our challenge statement for the career changer's side, I set off to answer five questions. I sorted the interview questions into 5 categories:
I sorted my research questions into five categories:
Their considerations during the journey, other stakeholders or people engaged in their process, what obstacles they have, what sorts of feelings around the process, and how their perceptions changes throughout the entire experience. Finally, what are their goals in mind in the UX field?
Not only did I interview the participants in our cohort, but I also recruited some participants outside the UW.
45-60 minute interviews with participants who shifted their career or background:
• 2 MHCI+D students (pivot to UX design)
• 2 shifters from the Design program at UW
• 1 shifters from work space
2 Subject matter expert interviews to gain a perspective form how they normally advise the students:
• Director of the Career Center at UW
• Advisor of MHCI+D Program
One of the challenging parts was understanding their feelings change throughout the process. I used the emotional journey during the interview and encouraged participants to express their feelings at each stage and their reasons.
This emotional journey map helped me illustrate the whole process through the career-changing experience and added a more qualitative dimension to the analysis of the experience. I heard stories about anxiety, nervousness, challenges during the career-changing moment, and positive keywords like exciting, supporting, and driven. I understood why they feel supported or struggle in a specific phase with this map.
I used Google Doc's comment for the coding process, and highlighted with different tags. Some of these tags included "Challenges", "Feelings," "Build up confidence," and "Share stories."
During the sense-making session, I was able to quickly identify high level categories and more narrow observations from the interviews. These observation clusters ultimately helped me identify our insights.
• There was anxiety or fear before landing a job. Career changers seek out additional external help, such as in the form of working groups. Also, family, friends, and networking can improve unhelpful feelings since they feel less anxious once they understand their obstacles to career shift might be the same for others.
• Most importantly, they tend to reach out to people with similar experiences. Even though their situations are different, there are similarities in their paths, and these similarities can relate to their concerns, and they would receive more helpful feedback.
I think get to know people get to know them and hear their stories and all that stuff. You know it's been good for us definitely.
-- P2
• Previous experience is still valuable for the shifters. However, they tend to forget the talent they have during the transition.
• Knowing others' stories helps career changers discover their potential strengths. Most importantly, the conclusions on their own about what their strengths are, rather than an instrument telling you, are more convincing.
That [listen to others] helps them discover what their natural strengths are, through stories, life stories, life experiences, the particular experiences that they enjoyed and felt were very productive.
-- E1
• Most career shifters don't have a good judgment of the priorities of the areas to improve, and when they don't know how to start, they tend to only focus on some hard skills (Adobe Suite, Figma, etc.,.)
• The challenge is not on the design skills but the mindset. However, building a design mindset is a long-term training process that takes UX designers or researchers years to master. It's important to let them reflect on their own and realize it is steady progress.
It really took years to recognize that like, I could do the whole work, and that was just a matter of building up the confidence and being there long enough to realize 'oh, this [design process] can be a learned skill.'
-- P1
I dive into the concept itself based on the insights we discover. I started thinking about promoting meaningful relationships between UX people, especially career changers who need support and guidance. I applied the insights into some core features:
- A profile where students can keep track of their growth and view others' stories.
- Top concerns that match with the best fit.
- Maintaining relationships with communication.
Based on the understanding of the users, we decided to implement the product with the experience principles listed here: The first one is delightful, how people interact with it, and people enjoy using it. Second, personalized help from a mentor who resonates with them. Also, Growth from both mentor and mentee. Mentors can also gain more support in this platform, connect with others, or learn new things from mentees. That also brings the last principle that they have an equal relationship.
Autofill is an option for students who can sign up with LinkedIn and upload their resumes.
Students would update their resumes frequently during job searching. The option of uploading the resume is a quick way to set up all the updated information.
Making a decision, like meant that you actually had to go through with it right.
-- P2
We [mentors and P2] love bouldering and always go bouldering together. Actually, we talked about study & work during this activity.
-- P4
From insight #1: Remove shifters’ stresses is guidance from people who resonate with their concerns. We encourage users to fill out their Future Goals, Top Concerns, and Personal Interests as the matching criteria.
We found that participants have different concerns during the transition journey, such as anxiety about making a commitment, considering their family, etc. It would be helpful for them to find someone who experienced the same situation. Also, mentorship is not all about professionalism; sometimes, personal interest is another excellent element in maintaining the relationship.
Based on the understanding of users, the system would recommend mentor lists here on the explore page. The goal for this page was to show the most recommendation lists for the users.
But I found that students had hesitated when viewing this list and selected one by one to check on their profiles during the user testing.
With the final prototype, based on the inputs, the platform will analyze your profile and provide the user with a percentage number, suggesting how suitable each mentor is.
Furthermore, adding more basic information to the list, like how many mentees the mentors have already, how many spots are left, location, and current occupation, can help students have an overall understanding before clicking each profile.
One insight (Insight #2) I found is that students can better manage negative feelings by reading other people's stories. Building UX skills is a gradual, long-term journey of years, a place for them to reflect, and knowing others' stories is essential. The idea of visualized Journey Map came to my mind. This journey map can help students to zoom out and understand their growth over time. Everyone can write the stories of this journey path.
I tried different versions to experiment on the journey map. The goal was to convey the information clearly. I learned that people want to see a mentor's different stages of growth, but also users get a lot of information out of one line.
As a result, I used the time at MHCI+D as an anchor point, and include some experience before and after. The path visually shows the journey of their growth.
Students can interact with them on this conversation page after being matched. My initial idea for the chat box was to keep the conversation going by showing the mentor’s interest and suggesting topics. But we found that students need a more efficient way to communicate: One participant mentioned that the back and forth communication to find the best meeting time was time-consuming.
One of the elements modified here was the Availability to directly book a meeting time with a mentor without back and forth communication.
The final design also incorporated a place 'memo' for users to note since it would be more 'functional' for the situation when they have a video call. As a result, users' notes, monthly goals, and messages are all integrated into one place.
There's definitely a huge amount of loyalty to the program, the alumni just get back and get back out. So part of it is they're wanting to get back.
-- E2
In addition, I know that our mentors are happy to provide help, but the awards system can keep mentors motivated, and let them know that the students are grateful for their contribution to the community.
Not only we designed for the mentor and mentee, the advisor will have his unique dashboard to see the satisfaction engagement of each cohort. The advisors keep track on student’s average engagement time. In this case, the advisors can easily understand how students are feeling about their mentorship if they run into any problems that they need to assist.
There is more potential opportunity for the journey path, thinking engaging aspects of interaction would increase the motivation for students to keep track and reflect on their own.
We’d love to be able to do more user testing with key stakeholders with our hi-fidelity designs to get their feedback on our final design concept. I think especially meeting with at least 3-6 other advisors would be useful, so we can get a sense of what product features are most important to these users.
Since we experiment with orcas in the existing program, I’d love to see how this product adapts to other programs.
Of participants indicate their companies provide mentorship
of students are provided with a mentor by their programs
Besides, we observed that even mentors are helpful for UX beginners, there are few school programs or companies that implement mentorship programs. Orcas can be implemented by more institutions to lower the barrier to running a mentorship program to help more people in their journeys. We hope Orcas can help career changers during their mentor finding process.