Amy is the Chief People Officer of Cloud 9, an American retail corporation that employs over 100,000 people. Amy is looking for a clear and quick way to feel the pulse of the company, and more specifically - her workforce. Recently, Cloud 9 has started an internal mentorship program using Gloat. Amy was hesitant about starting the mentorship program as she wasn't sure it could really have any impact on the employees, their career paths, or the business as a whole. Her team tells her that they think it's doing great... But, wouldn't it be nice if there was some clear visual way Amy could understand the true effectiveness of the program?

My goal is to design a 'Mentoring Hub' which will allow HR/leadership to get a clear view of mentoring activity happening on Gloat. They should be able to see past connections, current mentoring activity, and understand the effectiveness of the mentoring program at their company.
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I.

The most important step before starting any project is to sit with my team (my manager, PM, dev/engineering, etc) in order to fully understand what our product goals and capabilities are for this new feature. Why has the decision been made to spend time building a Mentoring Hub? What value is this feature expected to bring not only to the user, but also to our company? What limitations are we working within, technologically or time-frame wising?

Obviously, due to the nature of this task, this is not something I can actually do. But let's just say I did. Next step, research!

I made a quick sketch outlining and organizing the key points from the brief, and listing some initial questions that jumped out at me. Next to the sketch I typed up some of the questions so they can be viewed more clearly.

It seems like the main persona for this use case is the 'Leadership Executive' - What do we know about this persona? What do their days look like? How often do they go into/want to go into our software? And how much time will they spend once they're there? What is their level of technological understanding?
How do we know if a mentorship is successful - are there specific KPIs? Is this something we need to figure out ourselves? Is this something that is defined by leadership? Does our definition for success match with leadership's goals for this program? What are leadership's goals?
How can the design of this Hub sum up hundreds of mentoring programs? How granular should the information shown on the Hub be? What information is meaningful for the main persona to see? Is there a difference between that and what the persona thinks they want to see?
How will this feature fit into the rest of the features Gloat offers? Where will it sit in the software, and how will the features shown on the Mentoring Hub work with the features other type of users, such as the employees participating in the mentoring program, have access to?

At this point, in an ideal world, I would create and implement a full blown research plan to get answers to these questions. Really get to know our key users through surveys and in-depth interviews, use those findings to build robust personas, empathy maps, and user journeys, conduct competitive analysis, the works. But, no design process is ever able to be done perfectly, so for the sake of this project I'm going to make some quick assumptions based on Googling and common knowledge, in order to move forward with designing a successful solution for the Mentoring Hub.

Here are some of the assumptions I will be moving forward with:

Time is Money
Leadership Execs are busy and wants to spend as little time as possible getting the information they need. They don't want to learn new UI patterns or navigate around software. Clear, simple, and easy is what they are looking for. But! If they want to know more, they should always be able to. Leadership Execs don't like when they feel like things are hidden or blocked from them.

Successful Mentorship
For the sake of this assignment, we are going to say that some of the the KPIs for the mentorship program are; 35% of employees participate in mentorship, 60% of those employees report learning at least 2 new skills, and 10% of employees who have participated in the mentorship are promoted within a year.*

Numbers Matter
Leadership execs love numbers. While from a UX perspective numbers might not be the best way to gauge a feature/program's success, our persona wants to see the numbers anyways. Numbers are quick to read and understand, and make things easily quantifiable.

II.

While I'm specifically working on designing the Mentoring Hub, my work is not done in a silo. The success of my feature is directly tied to the rest of the Gloat software.

If there were a real project, I would either look at or create a detailed app map to make sure all the different parts of our software work well together, as well as detailed user flows to further help me design the best user experience.

So, working with what I have, I spent some time playing around in the Gloat Demo. I wanted to understand as much as possible about Gloat's software (both the IA and common UX/UI patterns currently implemented) as well as understand how the mentorship feature works from the employees' perspectives. If we have a specific KPI we are looking to hit, we need to make sure that the design supports that. If I'm part of a design team and my focus is the Mentoring Hub, it is likely that there is another designer whose focus is the general mentorship feature. So it would be crucial that I work together with the designer (or team - including any relevant stakeholders like PM) in order to make sure that both of our product goals align and support each other.

IV.

Together, all this information would allow me to start sketching out some basic wireframes.
Here are my sketches:

The idea that I am going with is that similar to the 'Hire' UI, Leadership Execs will have a separate area of the app dedicated to their use cases. This could include many different features, so the Mentorship Hub will be just one of those tabs.

The main screen of the Mentorship Hub will be a dashboard overview, where the Leadership Exec can monitor the current mentoring status across their company. There will be cards highlighting key information (such as number of current mentorships, past mentorships, skills employees have gained, number of mentees who have been promoted or a chart showing how mentorship has evolved over time) enabling the Leadership Exec to easily evaluate the effectiveness of mentoring in their company. There could also be cards with insights that provide suggestions to leadership about how they can improve mentoring (such as noting if certain regions have more or less mentorship or showing which specific skillsets succeed most within mentorships).

Of course, while sketching there were many more questions that came up. Would the users want to see a second nav bar allowing them to see more granular information, or would they rather have a cleaner UI and click deeper through buttons on the cards? If we did have the second nav bar, how should it be organized? By location, or department? What about mentorships that take place across different locations or departments? What information would be most important to show at the top of the screen? Would tables or charts be effective? What is the best way to visualize the important data?

Depending on timeline and capabilities, I could conduct research to gain more insights to these questions and create data driven designs. I could also build high fidelity wireframes and a prototype in order to conduct usability tests. And based on those results I would iterate where necessary.

V.

Let's go back to Amy's story. Now, Amy has access to Gloat's new Mentorship Hub. She can view information we know is important to her right on the dashboard, and she can drill down if she's interested in learning more. And guess what? It turns out the mentorship program is actually thriving. Lots of employees across many different departments have been participating and learning new valuable skills!

GLOAT MENTORING HUB

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