Somalis in Tech is on a mission to increase representation within the tech industry. With the lack of diversity in the sector, we aim to redress the imbalance by providing a platform that highlights community achievement through tech-related events and provides a space for like-minded individuals to connect.
OBJECTIVE
Design an MVP Mentoring Platform for members of the Somalis In Tech Community.
ROLE
Lead Designer collaborating in a team of 3 UX Designers, 3 Developers, A Quality Assurance Lead and a Product manager. Using an agile framework. We work in sprints of two weeks using google hangouts for fortnightly meetings and slack to update everyone on progress and challenges throughout the week.
DISCOVERY
The main goal behind conducting this research is to:
Identify opportunities to better support the SIT community
Uncover user pain points and suggest solutions
Inform a roadmap for 2022
**Unfortunately the file with all of of the support images and artefact have been corrupted.**
Secondary Research
Upon joining the community, all members are asked to fill out a registration form. As a team, we gathered a batch of 20 random forms and analysed the responses to these questions.
Section of the User Interview Guide I created
Primary Research
The secondary research gave a good insight into what members expected from the organisation and their current state. It also clarified that there was a wide range of different types of members that existed in the community. Although similar, all members faced different problems depending mostly on their career stages and location.
We decided to interview different categories of users. We aimed to dig deeper into the findings of our secondary research and empathise with users. I created the user interview guides with this in mind, which my team and I used to conduct 1-1 interviews.
Key Findings
Mentorship, Networking + Engagement
Presenting Research
As a collaborative team, it was important that all members were aware of research findings and why we would end up working on the mentoring platform. My 2 UX Colleague's and I created a presentation which was presented to the rest of the team.
IDEATION
Mentorship is the first way we chose to serve the community
The team each ideated on the problems they noticed their interviewee faced before presenting and voting on the different solutions. Mentoring seemed to pop up numerous amount of times among the team. We also created a poll on the community slack channel to ensure we were prioritising the right solution and as expected, mentorship also received a significantly high number of votes from the community.
Mind map I created on problem “ Students feeling lost and unsupported”
As the Somalis In Tech community exists to serve as many members of the community in tech, solutions presented were not discarded but rather logged in a backlog of projects to take on which informed the roadmap for 2022. There are also more feasible and easy to set up solutions which are being worked on alongside the mentorship project.
STARTING ON MENTORSHIP PROJECT
User personas
The surveys and user interviews together both provided insight into the types of members that existed in the community. These insights were used to craft user personas which we would go onto reference in a user journey mapping session.
These personas were referenced throughout the project in order to guide all design decisions moving forward.
Mentor Personas
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The Seasoned Pro
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First rodeo
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The Career Accelerator
User Persona I created for “ The Career Accelerator”
Mentee Persona
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The Newbie
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The Transitioner
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The Entrepreneur
User Persona I created for “ The Entrepreneur”
User Journey Mapping
User Journey Mapping created a shared understanding of the user and service across wider team
After defining user personas, all members of the wider team attended a User Journey Mapping session in which we used short user stories to brainstorm what a user may be doing, thinking and saying across the different stages of their journey.
Mapping was very useful for understanding the users behaviour and extracting interesting opportunities to optimise the mentorship service.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
User Flow
For each step of the user flow, we were able to document required features of the Mentorship service, which dictated necessary content and information architecture, as well as allow the product-development team to plan corresponding tasks.
HURDLES
Similar community organisation releases their own MVP of a mentoring platform
During the course of designing and developing the MVP Mentoring Platform a similar community organisation, and friends of SIT, released their own MVP of a mentoring platform. This posed the question of “Do we want to continue our efforts on building a similar service or does it make sense directing people to use theirs?”
It was a strong mutual decision to continue with the project
A quick meeting was set up to listen and discuss the teams opinions on moving forward with the project. Many important points were raised referencing technical feasibility, business and user goals and probably most importantly, reminding the team of the why behind the platform. It was a strong mutual decision to continue with the project.
WIREFRAMING
Rough Sketches
We worked on rough features as a team on Mural.
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Medium Fidelity Designs
My team and I took on a user flow each to design medium-fidelity desktop wireframes for, mine being the mentor flow.
