AlonesyCaseStudy

Project Overview

Background

Alonesy is a mobile app focused on teen mentorship. The app helps teenagers connect with an Alonesy mentor so they can be heard in a safe place and communicate comfortably. Our teams aim for the redesign is to increase mentee retention.

Duration

August 2021 - December 2021

Our Challenge

The largest challenge we realized early on in our research. We were designing for three separate users; supervisors, mentors and mentees. We decided as a team we would each take responsibility for a different user. I chose to lead the design for the mentee facing app.‍

Our Team

• Josymar De Leon - Mobile Developer

• Purvi Runwal - UX Designer

• Rishikesh Kayathi - Product Manager

• Rob Jones - UX / UI Designer

• Yiran Li - UI Designer

Discover

Comparative Analysis

As a team we decided to break off into separate groups in order to take advantage of our time. Purvi and I compiled a list and analyzed the apps within a day so we could present the findings with our entire team.

Our Key Takeaways were:

• Teens like to be engaged/immersed in what they are doing. Having different levels of interaction can build and strengthen upon this engagement.

• Make good use of white space. This gives the components and elements breathing room and allows for unique interactions and animations.

• Using a colorful and customizable background for the chat window can be fun and add personality to communication. And perhaps like a mood ring (no assumptions) they can change the background based on how they feel.

• Make good use of Illustrations to build upon the branding and theme. This will enliven the experience and ground the users (mentors and mentees) when using the app.

• Maintain full transparency and add a detailed FAQ. CTA's in FAQ so mentees/mentors can quickly act for crisis intervention.

• Use humanlike AI/bot when mentor is unavailable. The mentee could talk to the bot when feeling bored or blue. The bot can quickly act for crisis intervention and reroute communication to mentor/super mentor.

User Interviews

We began by sending out surveys to Alonesy's mentors and mentees. We interviewed four mentors to gather qualitative data in order to gain deep insight on their current usage of Alonesy's MVP.

Click to see questions for User Surveys and Interviews

Transcribing the Data

I transcribed the data with Otter and created post-its on FigmaJam so the data could easily be synthesized. We decided to meet up at a convenient time the following day for an affinity diagramming session.

Define

Affinity Diagramming Session

Our team met for a two hour session breaking down the qualitative data into groups so we could find actionable insight and problem solve.

Our Key Takeaways were:

• Onboarding process is vague because the questions are not specific enough to pair a mentee with a mentor.

• There should be more awareness about the supervisor mentors to mentors through the app.

• Adding a chat feature between mentors, so that they can help share knowledge about mentoring.

• Need to add a FAQ section for mentees as well as mentors. This will help both the users if they need general support or at the time of emergency.

• Unread messages notification should be shown until someone reads the message. (Currently it goes away as the user opens up the app)

• Many mentees get logged out and cannot login.

Defining the Problem

Our app has two types of users, the mentee and mentor (and supervisor mentor). After defining a theme for each user we began to ask questions to open up potential solutions for our next steps while empathizing with User Stories.

Understand

User Stories

During a two day period we began to add to an ongoing list of user stories based on our data. This level of empathy helped inform how we should create our persona and design our user flows and site maps. This is a small sample of our list of user stories.

User Personas

Our team met for a session to discuss the direction for the user personas. I met individually with team members to make sure that we were building personas that were data and empathy driven.

Design

User Flows

We decided to work on our flows separately and then decided how we would move forward when designing the screens. These are a few of my user flow samples.

Wireframes

Building out the User Flows helped inform and structure the wireframes so I could successfully test and reiterate on the designs. These are a few samples of the screens that I created.

Prototype

With the screens reiterated, I developed a prototype so I could test on the users and further reiterate the screens. This process is ongoing in order to maintain a successful app. It's necessary to collect data through the feedback cycle to keep the app user friendly and functional.

User Testing

I conducted user tests after I had create the first iteration for the mid fidelity and high fidelity prototype. This is a screenshot of one of the high fidelity user test. I had reached out to numerous mentees and scheduled with them via Calendly.

Armed with qualitative data, I created a simple to understand affinity map and sorted out possible solutions so I could easily communicate with our key stakeholders.

Next Steps

I will work and communicate with the developers to hand off the prototype and screens with the specific measurements.