MINGLE
connecting mentors and mentees
Duration
1 week!!
Team Members
Individual
Type
Google Design Exercise 2020
Tools
Paper Prototypes
Adobe Illustrator
Figma
Wireframing
Adobe Photoshop
The Prompt
Your school wants to strengthen the community by encouraging experienced students to connect with new students and help them adjust to campus life. Design an experience that allows mentors and mentees, including how someone may become a mentor and how to connect mentors to mentees.
The Solution
Through combining the fun of gaming apps, while still having networking elements of social media apps, I designed an app, Mingle, that turns academia into a social game. Mingle aims to connect student mentors by providing a space for students to ask for help and offer their expertise. This app also encourages students to participate in more school-wide events to meet more people while learning new skills.
The Process
01. Ideation
I started this project with research, brainstorming ideas, finding sources of inspirations, and creating a plan for the week.
02. Interviews (with Freshman at RISD)
From these interviews, I learned that underclassman not only want to reach out to upperclassman for homework help but also for other topics around campus, like how to go about getting an on campus job or how they picked their major, etc. Students don’t feel that these questions are something admin can answer but aren’t able to reach out to upperclassman because freshman don’t take classes with students from other years unless it’s Wintersession.
03. Scope
After interviewing users, I worked on organizing their priorities and exploring ways to meet their needs.
04. Skeleton
I drew different iterations on what each page should do and how to best communicate and display the information on each page to the user.
05. Wireframing
Wireframes Overview
After working out the basics of the app, I digitized it and made it clickable to experience the design. This allows me to iterate on the user experience and work on making it smoother and more intuitive. I also tested this clickable prototype on people to observe how they interact with the app and incorporated their feedback into further redesigns of the app.
