Each year nearly 1,000 children in the greater Pittsburgh area apply to receive mentors but cannot be served due to limited supply. The Mentoring Partnership of SW PA needed assistance in addressing this gap.
Magnify is a mobile application that encourages adults to form the habit of mentoring through simple, everyday actions. This tool helps deliver best-practice, informal mentoring to all youths in a community, and provides mentoring benefits to those unable to find formal mentors.
I played the role of UX interaction designer on this project, in charge of ideating from research insights and building tangible prototypes to vet ideas with users and stakeholders.
I worked with 4 other members on this project for 8 months to fulfill my Master's capstone at Carnegie Mellon University.
Process
Visioning & Ideation
Synthesizing our research presented a variety of insights. To utilize our findings, I facilitated visioning sessions for our team to ideate solutions that leveraged these insights.
Making Sense of the Problem Space
To understand the existing mentoring landscape and where our team should focus our efforts, we began by reviewing existing literature, defining our assumptions, and performing exploratory research with subject matter experts, mentors, and mentees.
Prototyping
I created multiple functional prototypes that represented the core of ideas that we refined through validation with users and stakeholders. These prototypes took the form of web pages, light weight mobile applications, and InVision projects.
Refining the Solution
Research insights continued to influenced the progression of our final solution.
Insight: Mentor training is only useful if it is consumable and applied in the real world.
Execution: Magnify educates users about fundamental mentoring skills, and presents challenges to promote the use of these skills in the community.
Insight: The impact of mentoring can be difficult to track, but is vital to motivating adults to continue mentoring.
Execution: Magnify gathers and visualizes mentoring interactions around the nation to provide a holistic view of Everyday Mentoring.
Insight: Mentoring is generally done in isolation from other mentors, but the knowledge and stories from experienced mentors are invaluable to beginners.
Execution: Magnify creates communities of mentors, where stories and expertise from specific mentoring moments can be shared.
Validating Ideas & Assumptions
We took the artifacts that came out of our visioning sessions back to users and stakeholders, measuring their gut feel to each idea. This helped our team gauge which ideas to further pursue into higher fidelity solutions.
Our final delivery to the Mentoring Partnership included the specs of the Magnify application, as well as a framework of how to implement Everyday Mentoring around the application. This framework provides the Mentoring Partnership with a scalable tool to train mentors across the nation, and allows them to focus on mentor-training content creation.
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