Femmecubator

 

Femmecubator is a nonprofit community focused on providing mentorship and educational resources to women of color in Tech. Its mission is to empower women of color to advance their careers in Tech.

The non-profit is currently working on an online mentorship service for its community members.

Team: 3 UX Designers, 3 Engineers, & Product Manager

Role: UX Designer

Methods: Stakeholder Interview, Competitive Analysis, User Flows, Affinity & MoSCoW Maps, Wireframes & Mockups

The Product team was struggling with feature creep on a Calendar feature.

After speaking with the Co-founder/Product Lead, I learned the following points:

  • Main Concern: Navigating their Calendar feature was difficult because they were trying to accomplish too much with this one feature. (Browsing Mentors by their availability on the Calendar, viewing the Mentors’ bio information, booking through the Calendar, syncing with Google Calendar, and more ideas from the Engineering team.)

  • Goal: The Product Lead wanted a new solution, something simpler and easier to navigate.

  • Criteria: Users can book a Mentor, Mentors can add their availability, and there should be an easy to way for users to view Mentor’s credentials.

Problem: How might we allow BIPOC Women in the tech industry browse and book mentors from our database for one on one mentorship sessions?

Hypothesis: The Calendar feature is not the best way to solve this problem.

Booking features are most commonly used to make appointments. Cards and Private-link pages/Profiles were the most popular features within these platforms.

Designs for the directory page were inspired by Zocdoc’s use of a Weekly Calendar in their Cards to make access to times and dates available without clicking into the card.

We needed to focus on the ‘Booking a Mentor’ use case and scrapped the Calendar feature.

By breaking down the ‘Booking a Mentor’ use case into 4 user flows, it helped determine what main features we needed for the MVP.

Main features derived from User Flows:

  1. Onboarding Users (Sign up and mentor application form)

  2. Profile/Account Preferences (All Users View)

  3. Mentor Dashboard (Mentor View)

  4. Mentor Directory (All Users View)

View more of my notes!

The Product Lead conducted a feedback session with an Affinity and MoSCoW map activity with the UX team to review my work and get more insights on the problem. Together we looked at other possible use cases and features we may need and prioritized them.

By hosting this activity with the entire team we were able to get everyone on the same page and everyone felt involved in the end solution. This prevented future feature creep because we were all aligned on the goal and plan moving forward.

It was clear from the proposed use cases and features brought up, that we should prioritize 4 main task flows:

  1. User Sign Up (Mentor & Mentee)

  2. User Onboarding (Mentor & Mentee) —> Dashboard & Application Forms

  3. Booking a Mentor (Mentee) —> Mentor Directory

  4. Adding/Editing Availability Time Slots (Mentor) —> Account Settings

Anything extra, like a messaging system, would be done through the Community Slack and set as developer tickets for the future.

 
 
 
 

Mock Ups

These are wireframes and mockups I made for the Account Pages before re-establishing the new MVP features. After we decided on the new MVP features, the Profile information was moved to the Dashboard.

I am using already established components from an already established design system.

v1 - profile

v1 - account

The Account Settings was paired down significantly. I mocked up the new design quickly based off of the old designs I made and got approval asap for dev.

We moved the launch date up by 6 months!!

Because we were able to cut the features list down to just a few core features for the team to focus on, the Product Manager told me we were able to push the launch deadline up by 6 months.

Usability testing is next

Due to time and budget constraints, we weren’t able to test our solutions right away. However, we are currently (July 2022) usability testing our solutions and conducting other generative research to improve the product.

Lessons learned

I learned that the best solution to feature creep is to make sure everyone on the Product Team (Designers and Engineers) are aligned towards the same goal and understand the roadmap for the project.

It’s important to have everyone working together on activities because it allows everyone the chance to express their opinions and contribute to the solution. Creating ownership of the solution ensures that everyone is on the same page about the next steps and the project goal.