overview
Designing the Future of Youth Mentoring with The Mentoring Partnership
The Mentoring Partnership was facing a short supply of quality mentors for the youths they served. They came to us with a goal of expanding quality mentoring in Western Pennsylvania and beyond. Our objective was to ensure the quality of mentoring relationships and scaling initiatives so that TMP can reduce the subset of youth who is not benefiting from the maximum potential of mentoring as proven by best practice research.
The solution we delivered was designs for a mobile application to help increase the number of youth mentors and an experience vision + number of recommendations about how The Mentoring Partnership might reach more youths and undergo positive digital transformation.
Timeline
8 Months
Team
1 Product Designer, 1 UX Engineer, 1 UX & Project Lead (Me), 1 UX Researcher, 1 UX Specialist
Role
As the project lead, my role was to drive the project forward, communicate with our client, and shape our overall project approach and strategy. I planned our design workshops and visioning activities for each section of the project. I also helped design our app (alongside our Product Designer), contributed to visual artwork for our deliverables, and assisted with UX Research & Testing.
background
The core problem: not enough youth mentors
Being a mentor is one of the most specifically impactful things that an adult can do for a young person. But every year, around 800 young people in western Pennsylvania alone end up on waiting lists for mentoring programs because demand for mentors exceeds supply. For The Mentoring Partnership, an organization devoted to ensuring all youths have access to quality mentoring, this represented an omnipresent problem that they weren't sure how to solve.
The needed a solution to scale up the delivery of mentoring, and we quickly identified with their help that the most promising untapped source of mentors was adults with existing relationships with youths who do not occupy official roles as mentors (TMP calls these people “Everyday Mentors”. Our core focus became:
Can we help potential mentors see themselves as mentors and train them to work effectively with young people?
Additional issues identified:
A Need to Increase Awareness: The Mentoring Partnership (TMP) has a training program and campaign called Everyday Mentoring that is meant to address the untapped market we identified, but people still don't seem to know about it.
Mentoring Quality is Vital: It's easy to scale mentor training at the expense of quality, and that is precisely what TMP does not want us to do in the long term.
Make it Measurable: Data is vital for TMP initiatives, and right now, they do not have any way of measuring engagement or retention after the initial mentor training session.
research
Rapidly understanding the mentoring landscape through analysis, interviews, & observations
Our team started by exploring and reframing our understanding of our client’s problem and coming to an agreement about the objectives of our research.
Dissecting and reframing our given problem, narrowing in on research questions
Core research questions:
How might we increase awareness of Everyday Mentoring and support adults with existing relationships with youths in a journey to become lasting mentors?
In what ways can we boost impact/effects and manage costs of being a mentor?
How might we facilitate ongoing mentor training and support?
Because no one on the team had experience as a formal youth mentor (I had taught high school students in the past, and another team member had been a summer camp counselor, but these weren’t formal mentoring relationships) we needed to dive deep to understand effective youth mentoring.
We used an array of research and synthesis methods to gain insights we could target in design
Literature Review + Competitive Analysis
As a team, we started by reviewing all literature provided by our client, supplementing this with academic research about best practices and current technology/social media use in mentoring. We documented our insights in a client-facing report and used them to inform our subsequent rounds of research.
I led us in a process called Conceptual Blockbusting after our literature review to discover what we had learned and what we still needed to learn.
Interviews & Observations
With a better understanding of the current state of the mentoring landscape, we went on to meet with 30 different mentors and mentees and visit 6 different mentoring organizations across the country to connect with and learn first-hand the current-state of mentoring and the problems that exist.
insights
We distilled our primary research into 4 insights that we used to begin our design visioning:
Unexpected
The term “mentor” comes with a weight of expectations that differs from person to person. Our interviews revealed the label “mentor” implied something different depending on who was asked. Youth view the word “mentor” to be synonymous with “therapist.”
“The word ‘mentoring’ at some of my schools, the kids are like, ‘Oh, why do you need that?’ They view is as therapy.”
Untethered
Just as mentees turn to their mentors for help in their lives, mentors seek help from others when they need assistance in their mentoring relationships. Our interviews revealed that this assistance to mentors came from many sources: friends, family, or program staff (if available).
“I don’t know everything there is to know about being a mentor, and I want someone to be there to support me.”
Unaware
While mentoring can inherently make a mentor feel good, seeing the impact on their mentee’s life is what makes it all worth it. In our interviews, we heard that seeing the short-term impact of mentoring incentivizes mentors to continue putting in the effort to volunteer.
“Sometimes it was as simple as seeing the young girl I was mentoring get a C on her math test instead of a D. I felt awesome even though it didn’t seem like that big of a change.”
Untapped
People who are driven to mentoring are going to do it with or without formal training. One mentor reported that he always starts a conversation by simply asking the youth how their day is going and gauges from their what he can do to offer support. Although he had formal mentoring training in the past, he hadn’t had recent training.
“I do it by myself… A lot of these programs— it’s really hard to get in for these kids who really need it, so I just kind of do it.”
designs
Through our research, we honed in on an untapped source of potential mentors (people who currently have relationships with young people but don't necessarily identify as mentors, like teachers, librarians, and coaches).
We then needed to activate potential mentors using technology they'd have access to. We needed to straddle the practical (giving our client a solution they can begin developing immediately) and the visionary (blueprinting the digital future of mentoring).
Experience Visioning
We began by exploring different avenues and ways we could engage these potential mentors.
I led the team through a series of rapid journey sketching exercises to identify areas of opportunity and resonant pieces to include in our digital solution.
EXPERIENCE RoADMAP
Out of our research insights and initial experience visioning, we created a framework for the next few years of youth mentoring. Our vision was one that empowers adults to be mentor-like in their everyday interactions with youths (we called this roadmap EM2025 – our vision of Everyday Mentoring in the year 2025).
The EM2025 vision was not just about making Everyday Mentoring training accessible to everyone, it was about creating the right incentives, support, and positive reinforcement to foster a habit of mentoring.
With EM2025 as our guiding experience vision, we mapped out the future user journey into four different phases of the EM2025 framework: Awareness, Buy-In, Learn by Doing, and See Impact.
DESIGN SPRINT
Using Google Venture’s Design Sprint methodology, I led the team in a series of design sprints that allowed us to focus in on one aspect of the whole journey where we thought we could deliver the most impact with a digital solution.
Each member of the team contributed a wide variety of ideas, from which we narrowed to build and test.
We used dot voting (or, in this case, star) to determine the overall ideas and features that we as a team thought were the best ideas towards solving our problem.
Prototyping and Testing
We used prototypes to test the assumptions embedded in our designs. We grouped and prioritized each set of assumptions before choosing the right prototyping method that would solicit the kind of feedback we needed.
solution
Magnify mobile app
Magnify is a mobile application that places Everyday Mentor training within the context of people’s lives.
While EM2025 is a blueprint that can take on many different implementations over time, Magnify is our vision of how EM2025 can be implemented within the next 2 years.
It builds a steady habit of mentoring, all the while making users aware of the impact they are making and gathering general data for TMP about mentoring interactions nationwide.
Magnify is the culmination of many rounds of user testing the concept of a tool to help aspiring mentors and Everyday Mentors grow in their mentorship and connect with others.
Core Features
Buy-in
In order to help potential Everyday Mentors understand their role an the purpose of everyday mentoring training, we front-loaded foundational information to ground them in the purpose of Magnify through an easy, personalized onboarding process.
After talking and observing over 50 different mentors, we knew Magnify had to cater to every different type of mentor and their unique needs and goals.
Our onboarding process allows users to identify the areas they want to gain skills and indicate their level of mentoring experience.
Learn by Doing
Micro training lessons are built into Magnify and crafted from the Mentoring Partnership’s existing Everyday Mentoring training materials.
Each lesson focuses on a single skill of Everyday Mentoring and is delivered in four interactive steps. Each lesson required focused ux microcopy that both informed and engaged the user.
This training flow went through multiple iterations based off of feedback from 32 different user testing sessions.
We discovered how important the act of reflection was in the training process, and saw how the forced pause resonated with our users as a chance to think where the skills could be applied in their own lives.
See Results
Data is a driver of strategy and initiatives in almost every organization.
The ability for Magnify to track mentoring interactions and provide a data-driven view of the impact of mentoring was crucial in the future success of Everyday Mentoring and The Mentoring Partnership’s efforts.
Magnify uses some simple gamification design techniques to track user’s confidence and see their place in the mentoring community.