Role
UX/UI Designer
Timeline
26 Weeks
Team
Individual Project
👉 Project featured at the ACIDO Rocket 2021 Competition
OVERVIEWMomentum
Despite women making up nearly half of the labor force, only 28% participate in STEM-based fields. Studies suggest that a feeling of not fitting in is the main reason why women are hesitant to pursue careers in STEM, often causing them to leave prematurely. This problem isn't just a moral or social concern; it also creates a notable economic shortfall, particularly considering the strong demand for jobs in this sector.
In response, my undergraduate thesis focused on addressing the issue by developing a community platform that utilizes mentorship to empower women in STEM, enabling them to navigate their academic and professional journeys with confidence and resilience.
How might we…
Create support aids for women in science, technology, engineering, and math-related streams that would allow them to build confidence and resiliency as they progress forward in their academic and professional endeavors?
Solution
Momentum is a women only app that focuses on talent retention in STEM-based academia and employment by providing users with a connection-building-based mentorship platform.
The app's mentorship matching model encourages users to take on both mentor and mentee roles, enabling women to garner interchangeable relationships and eliminate the vetting process often involved with seeking mentorship. The app's community space allows users to extend their mentor and mentee relationships into the broader app network.
OVERVIEWDesign Process
A closer look at the Double-diamond framework I followed:
DISCOVERResearch Objective
Explore this complex problem with a critical lens to identify re-emerging patterns and user pain points.
DISCOVERDeep Dive
Following the double diamond method, I diverged in my research by gathering relevant data and filling any knowledge gaps. I initiated the project by jotting down my assumptions about the problem space and mapped them out on a risk/certainty matrix. This allowed me to break into research by assigning secondary research work for each of my written assumptions.
I identified my high-risk assumptions as being the critical barriers to entry in academic and professional spaces for women/women of colour in STEM.
💡Key Secondary Research Discovery
One of my critical high-risk assumptions was that women tend to hinder their own progress in STEM-based pathways due to believing that they lack the skillsets to succeed.
A study by Microsoft validated this assumption, revealing that women indeed hold back their advancement in STEM fields due to a lack of guided support throughout their lives. This absence of mentorship and encouragement leads to feelings of imposter syndrome and a sense of not belonging among women in STEM.
The study also highlighted the importance of mentorship in connection to a higher retention outcome stating: "after a one-year survey, students with female mentors felt more confident in their engineering skills and felt more accepted in their department; In contrast, 11% of the mentor-less students, who changed majors, the students guided by female mentors stayed".
DISCOVERUser Interviews
My secondary research was soon followed by primary data gathering where I conducted both structured and semi-structured interviews with over 14 female participants in STEM-based majors.
These interviews were focused on uncovering the user-side of the problem area and were key in uncovering user attitudes, perceptions and lived experiences.
Blurred due to NDA
💡Key Primary Research Discovery
In my primary research, many of my insights from secondary research were echoed. A global theme across all my interviews was users having a negative perception of self, especially when users first ventured into higher education for their respective STEM-based degree programs. Users expressed that in their mostly homogenous learning spaces where both support and allyship lacked, they could not find adequate mentorship and felt extremely isolated in their learning. One user recalled feeling so isolated that she had no one to talk to other than her Starbucks barista.
User Quote:
“I have no one to talk to while I’m on campus. I would go to my classes and come home. I wouldn’t have said a single word to anyone, except for like, the Starbucks barista”.
- Participant 4
Primary + Secondary Research Theme Analysis:
DISCOVERCo-Creating with Users
Considering my users are critical to the project’s outcome, I also wanted to engage their input through solution formation. I decided to run two separate co-creation workshops where I gave my users various prompts, body-storming exercises and crazy 8s exercises to uncover user priorities and gauge ideas around what they think some solutions to their pain points might be.
Global themes in solution sketches:
Mentorship-focused platforms.
Inclusive digital communities.
Solution sketches from co-creation sessions.
DISCOVERResearch Conclusion
User needs sit at the intersection of mentorship and community with a higher emphasis on needing access to mentorship.
DEFINEEnviornmental Scan
A general web scan of available STEM-based and other mentorship services provided me with important insight into my competitive market. Something I noticed right away was that many of these services had some level of gatekeeping; they either asked users to join as paid members or fill out tedious forms to participate as mentors or mentees. This seemed like a huge barrier to entry for users seeking support right away.
All of the platforms were also web-based, and I didn't come across any mobile apps, making my proposed product already unique in nature.
Competitive analysis of other STEM-based mentorship services.
DEFINEUser Journey
To further understand my user’s positioning within the problem scope and empathize with their needs, I decided to create a journey map. The following journey map outlines a user seeking mentoring services online. Her friction points with the current availability of resources presented intervention opportunities for my proposed solution.
DEVELOPFinal Development Cycle
The development cycle consisted of 3 iterative phases. Outlined below is the process documentation from the third and final iteration of the app. I gained insights from the first 2 iterations by sending user feedback surveys and testing key functionalities of the app with users; through this process, I landed on iteration 3, where momentum took its final form as a connection-building-based mentorship app. I created 2 flowcharts to outline the "mentorship" and "community" features of the app, then broke into development with paper sketches. I later prototyped the paper sketches in hi-fidelity for user testing. By the end of the user tests, I generated a feedback report that aided in the platform's final UX/UI refinements.
Flowcharts:
Paper Sketches:
User Tests:
User Test Report:
DEVELOPUX/UI changes overtime
Highlighted below is an overview of how the app changed during the iterative phases in the development cycle.
Visual Design System for Momentum
DELIVERFinal App Concept
Onboarding
The app's entry point is an onboarding questionnaire where users input their occupation, interests, and other related information to allow the app to generate an appropriate user profile for the registeree. This user profile is then matched against other profiles on the platform to ensure that the user can connect with mentors and app members based on relevancy.
The onboarding questionnaire also requires that users elect roles as either mentors, mentees or both during onboarding. The suggested preference is given to the "both" option; on the back-end, this allows Momentum to simultaneously build a network of mentors and mentees to pull from—the heart icons on the app help to push this preference visually.
Mentorship
The core functionality of the app is Mentorship. On the "Book a Mentor" page, the app's intuitive matching system prompts up mentor profiles based on similar interests and occupations as the user requesting the session. Users also have the added agency to apply specific search filters to discover mentors with different interests or professions.
Facilitating booking requests for Mentorship is done using a ChatBot integration through the message centre. The user requesting a session is required to answer a few booking-related prompts, after which their request is sent internally to the desired mentor. This ensures that conversations between mentors and mentees happen on their own terms; it also diminishes solicitation between parties. Once a mentor accepts the booking request. The session is scheduled into the user's calendar.
Fostering Community
The app's community feed allows users to extend their mentor and mentee relationships into the broader app network. Members can visit the "Discover Connections" page to view user profiles on the app and tap the "Add Connection" button on the user's profile page to add members to their network of connections.
On the community feed, members can interact with their network through shared content such as images, stories, and other updates. This space is built with the intent of compensating women lacking allyship and support in their day-to-day environments by simulating it in a virtual setting.
REFLECTIONTime to reflect!
Conducting this case study allowed me to practice critical thinking and helped me learn to question everything. By following the double-diamond method, I was able to ground myself in my problem definition while also having the flexibility to iterate and challenge my assumptions every step of the way. I am delighted with the project's outcomes and excited about what the future holds for this project.