The Challenge
Pearson asked us to identify a problem that education will face in the next fifteen years – and solve it.
Award
D&AD Youngblood
Roles
• Product Design
• Interaction Design
• Brand Strategy
Project Vision
We saw the disconnect between students and the availability of practical experience available to them when exploring future careers. With the professional world changing at such a rapid pace, it would be a huge help for students to be able to connect with real-world professionals in a variety of fields. Conversely, all companies need to hire up-and-coming talent, and that process can be difficult and expensive.
So we set out to build a software application that could help connect students with professionals for individualized mentorship opportunities that would benefit them both.
The Kickoff
To begin, we had to determine the use cases for both our potential students and mentors, and what alternatives exist currently.
“How can we best facilitate mentor + student connections?”
“What needs to change within different professional fields?”
“What are the challenges we will face moving forward?”
“What would inspire professionals to use a product like this?”
“What needs change with in different professional fields?”
“Which users are most important?“
Meet the Users
Sarah Anderson
High School Senior
- Bright
- Hard Working
- Curious
Narrative
Sarah is a high school student who isn’t sure what career she wants to pursue.
She cares about people and has an interest in technology, and wants to learn more about what jobs are available in tech that would also let her focus on her passion for helping others.
Leah Smith
Product Manager @ Google
- Driven
- Compassionate
- Leader
Narrative
Leah is a Product Manager at Google who has an unconventional professional background, but whose intelligence and drive has helped her find success is whatever capacity she has worked.
She has a strong desire to give back and help the next generation find their way to find the success she has found for herself.
Key Path Scenarios
Often, products tend to have just one primary key path scenario. However, with PrePro, there are two key paths for each of our distinct users: One for the mentor, and one for the student. It is key to the product’s success that we refine both paths, because we need both Mentors and Students to have a positive experience on the app.
Lo-fi Ideation
By iterating on some very rough sketches, we realized some of the ideas and layouts we had in mind weren’t going to work.
However, the process of sketching them out let us iterate quickly and communicate more efficiently than if we had just used words, and allowed us to draw inspiration from each other to find a design solution that would deliver the most value relatively quickly.
Wireframes
Creating low fidelity wireframes, we were able to simplify the design and get into the details of user flow and what was working in our designs and what wasn’t.
As we explored the key path scenarios for both the mentors and the students, the designs became refined and the user flows became more clear and usable.
Style Guide
We knew we wanted a gradient to play a key role in the branding, as it visually represented the transformative nature of a mentor ship relationship, and thus you can see it sparingly but prominently through out the app, including being featured in the logo.
We also heard from mentors that they valued simplicity, so we kept the color palette simple and ground and prioritized legibility and a professional feel with primarily white on a deep blue-ish purple and the striking yet classic look of Avenir Next.
