It began with my personal experience. As a non-design background graduate as well as an Asian woman, I felt frustrated because of a lack of connection and ambiguity of direction. Also, I’ve been always supporting gender equality and thinking about how to make a better environment for people like me. So I decided to design for support.
"Why is the gender gap still big in the tech industry? How can we close the gender gap and bring diversity? "
Some might think it doesn't. But, According to statistics,
In 2020, only 25% of GAFAM’s employees are female.
The ratio of men to women in engineering is 5:1.
Diversity is going to bring benefits not only to individuals but also to corporations. It relates to productivity, creativity. Above all, it’s obvious that we fight against any discrimination against gender or race.
Lack of Representation
Gender Stereotyping In Children
Lack of Female Peers In College
Work-Life Balance
Sexual Harassment
I focused on "the lack of visible role models". And my suggestion is empowering minorities and women by mentoring.
Mentoring programs boosted minority representation at the management level from 9% to 24%
Women are more likely to have a mentor than men – 54% vs 48%
38% of female employees (in companies that have at least 30% women on their board) who have exposure to senior mentors believe they will make it to the board themselves, compared with 21% of women from companies under 30% target.
"Hard to find the right mentors or mentees"
"Scheduling, unclear goals, different expectation are the hassles for mentoring"
"Hard to keep a long-term relationship and it creates frustration"
According to research, people found it hard to find the right mentees and mentors. That makes it difficult to keep a bond between them. So I suggest a matching system based on their interest at the onboarding stage.
The main feed is sorted by different categories such as suggested mentors, organization, top mentors, and a location where mentees are. Further, they can sort mentors by languages, time availability, goals of mentoring with a filter feature. These are essential for getting everyone opportunities no matter where mentees are.
the biggest challenges of mentorship are “scheduling meetings” and “unclear goals” It’s revealed that those cause frustration to both mentors and mentees. So I tried to solve these problems at the requesting stage.
In many situations, mentees and mentors are not available for onsite meetings. To solve this problem, remote meetings should be easy to access. Having a video chat feature, users don’t need to use other softwares for video chat.
According to my research, mentees feel a big frustration when they haven’t got replies from mentors for requesting. And on a mentors’ side, they feel frustrated when they are not clear about mentees’ goals and it creates unexpected results. Dashboard helps mentees manage goals, schedules, situations of requesting.
As for take away...
I learnt the process of designing for a product.
to improve...
I figured user testing is the most crucial part.
And I'm suspicious that if I solved the problem of "keeping a long relationship".
I figured community feature can solve it for users to build their connection.