1Mentor

1Mentor is an early-stage startup that is developing a platform that will help both students and educational institutions harness AI to better match students with careers that properly utilize the skills they learned at university. This is designed to empower students to look at a variety of occupations that they might not consider without the knowledge gained from the 1Mentor platform.

We jumped in and provided help to the team at 1Mentor in the build out of their student platform. Specifically, they were looking to validate the reccomendations from their previous round of testing with another round of usability tests.

While users in the initial round of testing enjoyed the clean aesthetic and were excited by the idea behind the concept, they found the overall layouts to be confusing and for certain tasks to be unnecessarily long and convoluted. Specifically, they pointed towards the user onboarding flow and skill matching as particular points of frustration and confusion. In general, they found that there was a lot of information that was not properly displayed, conveyed, or referenced in a manner that made sense.

After each task, the user was asked to rate the difficulty of the task on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being very easy, 5 being very hard). Overall, the average difficulty rating for the tasks performed was a 3.375. 1Mentor is looking to bring the difficulty rating to under 2 by the time the platform goes live.

With this information in mind, the team at 1Mentor performed a round of iterations on their designs to address these concerns. We then took these mock-ups and created a prototype which included several changes of our own. Specifically, we changed some of the verbiage in order to better convey what each area did, altered some color schemes, and changed certain areas of flow progression. Once we had our prototype ready to go, we performed a round of usability testing.

For this round of testing, we had 5 new subjects who were all still in school and could possibly benefit from a platform like 1Mentor. We took inspiration from the previous testing script in order to address the problems that had arisen. This included:

Overall, the results were overwhelmingly positive: users found the onboarding process to be smooth and not too long, the coloring made sense, and the language was found to be very clear and understandable. We did, however, have two spots of difficulty. The first was in regards to comparing the user's skill set to their preferred occupations. Nearly all of the subjects immediately went to the skills section rather than the occupation section where the information was located. We believe this was due to the way the question was worded:

The reasoning behind the 5 slots is that the platform limits the number of preferred occupations to only 5 to prevent users from adding too many jobs and rendering the point of the platform moot. However, as the users pointed out, it is not necessary to have these blank slots present or have the modal presented when adding an occupation if you have fewer than 5 already added to your tracker.

Much like with the first round of testing, we asked the users to rate each task on a scale of 1 to 5. The average rating across all tasks dropped to a 1.5, with no individual task rising above 2.5. This was a major improvement for the platform and the team at 1Mentor were ecstatic to hear these results.

Taking the knowledge we gained from testing, we presented our findings to the team at 1Mentor. In all, we recommended the following:

On the whole, they were very open to the recommendations presented and allowed us to make the minor changes detailed but to refrain from changing the Explore tabs as that was a change recommended from the previous round of testing and they wished to see how that looked moving forward. Regardless, we believed that, with the changes, the platform is sound and ready for implementation. We then implemented the changes and handed the platform back over to 1Mentor.

I am very happy with the changes that we recommended and implemented and I'm ecstatic to see how the platform continues to grow.

My thanks to my fellow designers, Carice Chan and Haley Smith, for all of their help through this process, as well as Paul Balcazar and Esteban Veintimilla at 1Mentor for their guidance.