MentorMatch is a mobile application that allows post-secondary students to connect with a peer mentor or someone in need of academic help from their school. It is personalized to fit each students’ needs and a space for making new friends on and off campus.
MentorMatch is designed to give users a safe space to expand and share knowledge amongst the community.
01/14/21 - 04/05/21
6 weeks
Human Computer Interaction
Prof. Sara Nabil
Eva Lee
Jessie Lu
Max Sossin
Anirudha Verma
Cathy Yan
User Research
User Testing
UX Design
Visual Design
As all team members were full-time university students, we knew the struggles of being one, and the struggles were further amplified when school moved online during the COVID pandemic. Many were cut from their network of peers and asking a quick question for the professor wouldn’t be possible without booking an appointment separately. Getting academic help has never been so difficult.
I wanted to explore what is currently successful on the market and what can be improved. I suggested to create a competitive analysis, so we could effectively reflect the best in our design. This exploration would lead us to analyze the three most popular tutoring applications that is on the market. I found that almost none of them had this aspect of specifically providing help that university students actually need.
- most popular
- courses offered are too general
- nice user interface
- lack of reliability
- concern over scamming
- fixed pricing
- personalized dashboard
- too pricey for students
Next, we wanted to learn more about other experiences and how we can leverage them to cater towards a product that reflects our target audience’s needs. We interviewed 5 post-secondary students, ages around 18-25, who are currently attending various universities in Canada through an online-meet.
Through analyzing our user interviews, the team came up with 3 main themes that ultimately all tie in together to promote the sense of accessibility when it came to getting academic help.
With our findings, we can confidently categorize our audience into two main user groups:
Overall, from our interviews and findings, I prompted the team to come up with some areas of challenge. And together, we used turned these challenges to opportunities for design. The questions for design we came up with were:
One of my team members and I created a set of low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes for the mobile app in Figma.
We iterated and tested 3 times while building upon suggestions of the previous design given by our testers.
Now looking back on my project, if we had more time, we could definitely further explore a way to make it fun for users to match. Some discussions we had after reflecting on this included maybe incorporating a swiping system that is often used in dating apps, but ultimately this might lead users to stray off of the intended purpose. So this one could be explored a bit more... I also personally wanted to look more into was adding some flexibility within the app based off of your personality type. And lastly, since all of my group members and I are computer science majors, it would be super cool if we could code this up and make it the real deal. I think it would be really interesting to see that come alive as well.
