Mentee

Helping companies manage their new employees with mentorship at the core of on-boarding.

Overview

The first few days of a new job are not only crucial to employees learning what they need to know to be successful, but they also set the groundwork for creating cohesive and well-integrated teams for managers and provide the foundation for employee retention and satisfaction within the company.
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I worked to create a product that allows teams to easily and seamlessly onboard new employees through mentorship and adequate documentation.

My Contributions

User Research, User Interface, User Experience

My Role

UX Designer

Platform Details

Desktop

The Problem

Onboarding is difficult and often ambiguous for small to medium sized businesses

The Challenge
The on-boarding process is difficult for everyone from HR and the managers to the new hire themselves. Managers want their teams to be a well oiled machine and new hires want to feel like they’re ready for this new challenge, but sometimes things go awry.

The Opportunity
To understand what are the struggles with the on-boarding process and how might we fix this process.

Mentors, Mentees & Small to Medium -sized Companies

Problem Deep Discovery

User Interviews

Comparative Research

My first goal was to learn more about on-boarding processes including successes and failures, who is involved and what experiences people have had with on-boarding in their workplaces.

I conducted 8 interviews with employees and managers in order to understand the pain points of the on-boarding process and to learn about their positive experiences with getting their teams to work cohesively together.

Interviews

Understanding Context & Further insight.
From employee interviews, I found that people’s most successful onboarding experiences, the ones where they felt the most integrated into their co-workers and able to do their job, involved hands-on involvement from someone within their team.

Interview Insights

Great onboarding experiences involved a great manager. ‍

“Jesse and Ryan walked me through the accounts I was going to be working on and helped me navigate the software. I really liked being able to get to know them [ Jesse and Ryan ]”
- Kevin (Employee)

The worst onboarding experiences involved only computer-based training and no actual human interaction.
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“They sat me in front of a computer screen for 2 weeks where I was told to watch online videos… I had no experience actually talking to customers”
- Alex (Employee)

Many managers ended up creating their own structure and documentation for those who worked on their team.
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“When we started using Salesforce I found their overall documentation lacking and not specific enough. I needed to create my own training documentation that went through specific workflows in order to support my team’s training, otherwise we’d be totally lost…”
- Aysha (Manager)

Who are we serving?

Problem Statements

The research helped me define problems that people were having in the on-boarding process from the insights I was given. They also helped reveal feature ideas for the app as well as problem statements that I would then set out to solve.

Problem Statement & User Types

I used what I had learned in my interviews to create three statements that encompassed a problem that each person was having and why it was important to them to get the problem solved:

Prioritizing & Planning

Feature Analysis & User Flows

Feature Analysis

Wireflows

In order create a product that solved key problems for users, I took the insights I gathered from interviews and organized those into key features that would, should, could and wouldn’t be included in the MVP of this product.

Must

Task creation by Mentor
Mentor ability to assign Meetings and Tasks
Calendar & Events
Comments on a tasks

Should

Flag struggling Mentees
Add documentation
View Mentee's progress with onboarding

Could

Ability to Customize Dashboard
Mentee ability to add events

Wont

In App Chat
Matching to Mentor

User Flow & Prototype

Mentor user flow
After I prioritized the features for the MVP. I set out to create user user flows for that MVP.

Creating & Iterating

Designing the stype guide

UI Research

Style Guide

Iteration

I knew I wanted the app to appeal to an audience between the ages of 25 - 35 who were tech savvy. I chose fonts that would be clearly legible and not draw too much attention to themselves.

Style Guide

Dashboard Evolution

Hierarchy & Influence.
One of the most difficult parts of this design process was figuring out the hierarchy of the dashboard. Although I was able to do a fair amount of tests with this current design I would love to be able to conduct more testing of this design in the future.

Prototype

Prototype Testing

Through testing, we were able to gather insight into what real users thought about our work and make changes based on feedback.

Do these belong together?

In testing other users I heard that there was a disconnect between the task at hand and what was on the screen. Is there a better way to separate the content but still keep the relationship?

Problem:
The separation line made things seem disconnected

Solution
Combining the task and "add new" allows for the task adding to integrate directly into the interfae without a visual separation

You could cut your flow in half

In testing with two different users I was told that there were too many steps and that I could cut out several steps in the flow if you get the users to where they need to go faster.

Problem
Unnecessary steps lead to user fatigue and frustrations

Solution
Removed the profile to provide the user with the most relevant information

There's a lot going on here, what do I do first?

The users seemed unsure on what you should be doing on this page. This made me re-examine what is actually important to the user.

Problem
The hierarchy was disjointed here. The user needed this information but there should be a better indication of what to do.

Solution
Added a "new items" section and kept the. methods of contact visible

Learning & Future Testing

During this work I learned a lot about how I think when it comes to design. My first instinct is always to add as much functionality right away, but during this projects I was able to hone that desire and measure what was most important.

Prioritization

Finding the main feature through stakeholder & user needs.
I have always had an inclination to give the user everything they migh possibly need and have asked for. The balance comes when the stakeholders and technical requirements also weigh in. This has allowed me to give proper weight to certain features over others.