STEM Muse
Project Overview
Aiming to make mentorship easy and accessible
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Working with a client to create a brand new dashboard to help white-label and market their SaaS product. The administrator portal aims to meet all the needs and tasks of a program manager and simplify their day-to-day tasks by consolidating them all into one dashboard.
Project Type
Client Web Platform Design
Client
STEM Muse
Timeline
3 Week Sprint
Role
User Researcher
UX Designer
UI Designer
Adobe Color Contrast Checker
Adobe Color Blind Safe
Tools
Figma
FigJam
Problem Statement
Task Flow
Wireframing
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Methods
C&C Analysis
User Interviews
Affinity Mapping
Persona
What is STEM Muse?
STEM Muse is an early-stage startup and mentorship network that supports the professional development and success of women in STEM
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STEM Muse's cofounders want to grow this service into a mentorship platform that companies can use to recruit and hire underrepresented talent. The objective is to eventually create and white label a SaaS platform so other companies can run similar mentorship programs.
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However, STEM Muse currently does not have an online-based mentorship website or platform for their current mentorship program. Rather, the program is run through a program manager using different resources like a Google Suite, Qualtrics, and more. Thus, we would be designing an admin dashboard for a product that doesn't currently exist.
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The goals and priorities for this project were to:
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Create an admin portal for a company to onboard users
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Implement a matching process within the portal
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Add a communication feature within the platform
C & C Analysis
Competitive
Comparative
We first conducted competitive analysis with other STEM or women in STEM mentorship programs, who were determined to be direct competitors. In addition, we completed comparative analysis with other similar matching platforms like dating apps and sorority recruitment services.
From this initial research, we were able to identify key features of mentorship programs and conduct a SWOT analysis of the current STEM Muse mentorship program website.
User Interviews
As research is the foundation of insights, we conducted user interview with 8 people across 3 categories: mentors, mentees, and ERG leads.
These interviews were crucial in mentor and mentee perspectives and needs in a mentorship program.
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This data was synthesized into an affinity map, through which we discovered that mentors and mentees have individual wants and needs from a mentorship program that are hindered by individual and shared pain points.
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Most importantly, mentors and mentees don't believe it is their responsibility to fix these blockers.
Filling the Gap!
With thorough research, we discovered this gap between the needs and blockers of the mentors and mentees.
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This gap is filled by a facilitator role, or in other words a program manager.
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To support this facilitator role, we conducted additional research with STEM Muse's program manager, Tara, and was able to gain insight into a program facilitator perspective, needs, and responsibilities.
Defining the Problem
01 Persona
Meet Christina, a program manager who has been tasked with being a facilitator for a mentorship program. Her job includes matching different mentors to mentees interested in being in her program, along with facilitating and creating a comfortable environment for participants to feel welcomed and at ease about their mentorship experience. She wants a better way to manage all of her current tasks in an organized and swifter fashion so she is able tend to her other roles within her company.
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Her Responsibilities include:
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View user and initiate matching process
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View Conflict form responses
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Resolve conflicts presented in Conflict responses
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Send out feedback survey
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Check Feedback Data and analyze it
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Send out first meeting messages with expectations and documents
02 Information Architecture
Through our research, we were able to identify a program facilitator's different responsibilities, desired features for an admin portal, and solutions to pain points.
These different needs and responsibilities were categorized into different sections that informed our initial sitemap, so that the admin portal would contain everything a program manager would need to complete day-to-day tasks.
03 Problem Statement
Christina is facilitating a mentorship program as a program manager. As the program is still in the early stages, she is currently the only person in the administrative role and handling a lot of different tasks at once. Christina is having difficulties manually conducting all the different administrative tasks and is frustrated with having to use several different resources spread across different websites and tools.
Christina needs a convenient way to access all her tasks and tools in one consolidated place because her current system of navigating to the different resources and conducting recruitment, data analysis, collecting feedback, and other administrative duties by hand is time consuming and inefficient.
User Flow
To focus and guide our ideation and designs, an optimal admin user flow was created to encompass all of the different administrative tasks that Christina may encounter. This flow details Christina's many potential branching journeys on the website dashboard and outline actions that she will take.
Wireframes
Using the user flow and sketches from ideation as a guide, we crafted wireframes to encompass all of Christina's needs and responsibilities into one dashboard.
Matching
Our first feedback was that the matching users list was complicated and difficult to understand. Users were unable to distinguish which mentor-mentee pairings were matched together.
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For greater pair visibility, we grouped the pairs together in the users list with the same colors and also added a section that directly lists the paired mentor/mentee's name for each user.
Moment of Delight
Users were unsure whether they had actually completed the matching process because it only consists of a simple button-click with no visible feedback.
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To address this, we added a matching confirmation pop-up that served as sort of a drum roll up to the matching to create a moment of delight once the matching was completed.
Navigation
Each consecutive usability test identified a confusing aspect in our navigation flow that we quickly fixed with each iteration.
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We made subsequent changes both in the content of the navigation as well as the structure of our site to make it as easy to use as possible.
Filtering
Users expressed concerns about the navigation and searchability of the users list in the dashboard. They wanted to be able to narrow down the list to specific people.
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To incorporate this feature, we added a lot of filtering and sort options to the table of users in addition to the exisitng search bar.
