Techstars
Mentorship App
Company
Techstars
Role
Lead Designer
Timeline
2020 - 2021
The opportunity
Techstars Mentors Madness provides the ability for startups to connect with thousands of mentors to help them grow their business. Through previous user research, we knew this was the main reason why people joined Techstars.
Mentor connections were mainly done in person, so when COVID hit in 2020 it allowed us to reimagine a better experience leveraging technology to connect founders & mentors.
Our process
With time not on our side we worked on user research and wireframes in paralell, including lower fidelity designs when talking with startup founders and mentors to get their feedback. We also knew we had to get an MVP solution out the door, and planned on using that validate and iterate on a more complete solution down the road.
I worked with product & engineering leads to define a 4 sprint roadmap which gave us time to figure out what we really needed to build, while also moving quickly.
Early designs & user testing
Techstars has over 10,000 mentors, so whatever we designed had to encourage users to slice and dice that database to find specifically what they wanted.
Startup founders looked for mentors based on 2 things, industry & skillset, so we designed a multi-step flow where founders would choose whats important to them and then it would spit out a list of mentors.
Shipping the MVP
After user feedback, we removed the earlier steps in the process, and skipped straight to the list of mentors, with the ability to pare down that list with filtering. This also simplified things quite a bit.
We also added an autocomplete search to supercharge the filtering ability.
We launched this thing for an MVP solution on techstars.com while gathering more data while figuring out the longer term solution
Heatmaps revealed users gravitated towards using autocomplete search vs. other filters.
Iteration beyond the MVP and our real solution
We focused on designing an experience with search at it's core, since users preferred the search functionality above all other methods when finding a mentor.
We had been considering a centralized Techstars app for everything, beyond mentorship. We had several scattered web apps throughout the years, and through broader user research realized that our users didn't have a ton of use for a desktop experience.
Taking all of this into consideration, we started re-imagining the mentor experience as a native mobile app.
Early wireframes helped us flesh out prioritizing search and the ideal user journey beyond that.
Home screen
We prioritized search and also thought this was a good opportunity to surface mentors based on what we already knew users would be interested in.
Search and results
We expanded the autocomplete logic from our MVP so you could search by name, industry, company, as well as layering search results to find exactly what you're looking for.
Mentor profile
From within the mentor profile, you can get more info on your mentor, send them a message, or favorite them, which adds them to a list for later.
Messaging
Mentors' communication with startups was often scattered between LinkedIn, email, and text, and hard to keep up with. So we though in-app messaging made sense for both sides. In addition, we designed a singular list which let users keep track of their favorite mentors and their convos all in one place.
Results
The results of this project are confidential, but the overall response to the new designs were positive. Founders, mentors, and other stakeholders appreciated the improved ability to connect - truly a win-win for everybody involved.