Sparking connections between mentors and mentees.
Everyone deserves a career that provides fulfilment. Many of us who have found our place in the world have been guided by others. Some assistance is small - such as answering an important question. Some assistance is large - such as having a long term mentoring relationship.
In this short design sprint, we explored How Might We create a movement to encourage people to connect and help each other so that they can find a meaningful career path.
The Founder and Principle of Being Agency, Kerry Neethling, had a grand vision for Hand Up Day that included world wide impact, and she provided our team with flexibility to be creative in how we might explore delivering on her vision.
We look forward to a seeing Hand Up Day go live in 2020!
Who Was Involved
We were a 5-person Service Design team and a 6-person User Experience team. The Service Design Team was led by Jennifer Philippe and consisted of Liam Hoffman, Aldrick Ekin, Alana Lyons and me. The UX team consisted of Alisa Yuldybaeva, Daniel Lai, Denise Tan, Lilian Jiang, Michelle Foo, and Pallavi Chopra. The service design worked for three weeks mostly in the Discover and Design phase of the project. The UX team worked for two weeks mostly in the Develop and Deliver phase of the project.
My Role
As a member of the Service Design Team, I partook in activities ranging from customer interviews to drafting the deliverables. I led the Persona Development and the Blueprint Development. The team put a significant amount of work into the personas, and they were the deliverable that the client seemed to most value from the Service Design team.
What we did
Although the Service Design team spent the majority of our time working in the Discover and Design phase of the double diamond, we also followed this up with a rapid cycle of ideation, concept building, and concept testing. The Service Design team’s core contribution was developing in-depth customer insights, personas, and we outlined the features for the Minimal Viable Product (MVP).
The UX team built a MVP prototype and carried out one round of testing. Their core contribution was getting a prototype into people’s hands and sharing the specifics of what they learned.
The Service Design Team conducted 13 interviews with people that met our leadership profile. These were teachers, directors, and managers across multiple industries. All were either managers of people or influential in their community. We asked questions exploring their career history, leadership style, values, giving history, and mentoring history. We also conducted a card sorting exercise to learn more about their motivations for giving back.
We discovered 5 insights that helped us understand their drivers to give, why they engage with charitable organisations, how they benefit from giving, and their approaches to giving back.
We found that leaders varied across two spectrums:
Leaders either focused their energy to advancing the goals of a community, or they focused on advancing the goals of their own team within their business or organisation.
Leaders either preferred to have a few strong connections, or they preferred to have many shorter term relationships.
Using these two spectrums, we created four personas: The Altruist, The Quick Sage, The Advisor, and The Manager.
We invested time into making certain that our client could empathise with these personas. During our team’s final check-in meeting with the client, it was clear that we were able to meet this objective. They excited her, and she instantly started talking about how she knew people that matched the personas.
With these personas in mind, the team used the Customer Value Proposition Canvas to gain further insights into how Hand Up Day might add value to each persona. We developed concepts to align with what our personas would value. We created low fidelity storyboard prototype and tested them with several leaders.
Taking what we learned from our testing, we refined and combined several of the concepts. We developed a user experience that would attract the Altruist, as a mentor, and would leverage the Manager to access their employees as mentees. This would allow our team to explore an MVP for Hand Up Day and an additional service that we believed might attract people to the platform in its infancy.
We felt that a campaign to attract Managers might be an effective method of gaining customers and kickstarting the the Hand Up Day Platform. We created a business model canvas with this product and service in mind to assess market feasibility.
The Blueprint was developed to explore what it might take to implement the MVP. It was a useful tool to explore the backend of the campaign and how other products such as LinkedIn might be leveraged to promote Hand Up Day.
After we handed the project over the UX team, they built a website MVP prototype and they carried out the first round of user tests. They built a significant number of features and got the MVP to a solid starting point. The team recommended two additional iterations of testing and refinements before bringing in a development team.
What we learned
Like all relationships, mentoring is complex. Technology can play a part in this relationship, but for it to enhance lives, the platform will need to understand how to progress the the relationship into “real life”.
The power of personas. They were key deliverable from the Service Design team. I have not always been a fan of personas and this was a good reminder of their power. They sparked excitement and creativity for our client.
The Service Design team and User Experience team should have integrated more and collaborated throughout. Our schedules didn’t make it possible, but I believe that we would have done better work if we would have worked together throughout the engagement.
At such an early stage of a project, I question whether a blueprint was a good use of our time. A refined customer journey map would have been sufficient, especially with the complexity of having more then one client.