VILLAGE
What is Village
A micro-community based peer mentorship app that allows college newbies to connect with peers and gain mentorship in order to adjust to campus life. Because it takes a village.
The Ask
"Going to college
for me was overwhelming!"
– Me’Osha Jupiter, 27
The Opportunity
There are a plethora of emotions that people feel when they experience something for the first time and starting college is no different. Could you imagine doing something all alone in a new state, or even country? What about doing something no one in your family has ever done?
The ask presents a unique opportunity to help international students, out of state students, and first-generation students adjust to campus life through connecting with not only experience mentors, but with people experiencing the same thing at the same time.
Welcome to the Village
Onboarding
Prior to the onboarding phase mentors have submitted applications for vetting on the university administrative level they are then given an access code to create a village account.
During the onboarding phase, both the mentor and mentee will be given short quizzes that will vet their compatibility. The quiz will begin by letting them list the three words that describe them best as a primer. It will then move into more questions such as major, hobbies, how often they would like to communicate and their mentee/mentor preferences. In the Mentee/Mentor preference portion this will prompt the user to answer the harder questions that deal with sexuality preference and cultural preferences.
Since people have different needs we want to make sure they are being matched with someone with similar experiences or backgrounds.
Matching
The Village
The Village is the dashboard and group chat, it is essentially where everyone in the micro-community can see what is going on and where they can connect via traditional chat and video chat. This is where Google integration can come into play by leveraging google hangouts to allow for conference video chats with the entire village.
Calendar
The calendar holds everyone in the village accountable and productive, two things college students need. The cool thing about the village calendar is that it auto finds the common free time in each person’s calendar so that they aren’t struggling to coordinate free-time to meet. It alleviates the pain of having to plan around the hectic class and study schedules.
How did I arrive at this solution?
Understanding the People
Defining their problem
After understanding who would be using the app, I wanted to understand the problems they had, their needs, and their wants. In this phase I uncovered:
- Mentors may be mentoring for the first time too.
- Mentees will find value in having a peer that is doing college for the first time as well.
- Mentees and Mentors often have hectic schedules.
Problem Statement:
International, out of state and first generation college students often lack the resources to successfully adjust to campus life.
Idea sketching
I began organizing my thoughts on how to design the experience by doing a crazy 8’s exercise and using the MoSCoW matrix in order to reach my minimal viable product (MVP). I explored many options and many different flows that proved to be viable and valuable to each user. In this phase, I was able to test low fidelity to see if my experience was something that people actually wanted.
Here I discovered that people would prefer to be auto-matched much more than having to choose their own mentor or mentee by reading profiles.
Prototype
After testing my low fidelity prototypes and receiving feedback, I continued to iterate in order to reach a final prototype and worked on minimal branding to bring the idea of ‘Village’ to fruition.
Concept Validation
Finally, I tested a more realized prototype and concept to get a greater understanding of if ‘Village’ could be used on college campuses!
Here I discovered that people would love to be paired in micro-communities in order to adjust to new environments.