Microsoft Mentoring
As my project is under NDA, I can't disclose full project details. If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to me at clairedycat.kantner@gmail.com
Mentorship is in high demand
Employees seek mentors for a variety of reasons, such as navigating a new company, improving skills, and finding a supporter who shares interests. Employees who want to become mentors are driven by a range of motivations, such as making a difference in someone’s career, broadening their perspectives, or learning to grow as a leader. Organization leaders also create their own mentoring groups by identifying an audience and tracking insights on how many connections have been made.
Problems with existing mentoring tools
Many tools lack real time integrations with existing profile and community data
Solutions with automated mentor pairing risk losing an organic connection for mentees and mentors
Measuring outcomes from mentoring programs is essential to understand and adapt to employee needs
How might we empower Microsoft employees to connect and grow through a mentoring experience that provides easy discoverability and a reliable, consistent structure?
Design principles
Discoverability
Provide the ability for all users, regardless of their network or experience, to find mentors or mentees.
Growth
Educate users on successful mentoring and enable employees to leverage it as a growth modality.
Connection
Facilitate quality mentoring connections that evolve organically.
Structure
Offer a consistent mentoring experience, that is integrated in the MS ecosystem and customizable to the employee needs.
After over a year of work on the team, and after applying feedback from 4 different user research studies, I was able to design and deliver a mentoring platform that leverages existing software and data in the form of two main products: A Teams app for mentors and mentees, and a dashboard experience for program coordinators.
Final designs
For our landing overview page, a design challenge we faced was not being able to include a search bar to help mentees discover mentors. Getting around this, we included a few other ways to highlight mentors, such as filters, mentoring topics, and featured mentoring programs.
In recognition of the complexity of the mentoring needs and scenarios, our platform aims to provide a catalogue of predefined Mentoring topics, that once selected by employees and added to their mentor and mentee profile, can enable a quality match of supply and demand.
At the backbone of our platform is mentoring programs. These communities allow you to connect with others around specific interests or groups, similar to employee resource groups (ERGs). Program coordinators can give members resources or set requirements for joining, like completing a training.
Connecting with a mentor is easy, as you can quickly scan their company profile and decide if they are a good match, or save them for later.
Even if you are brave when it comes to meeting someone new, using a Teams chat bot as an intermediary enables everyone of all comfort levels to track their mentoring relationships with ease and confidence. Our chat bot also allows you to schedule meetings without leaving the chat window.
You can track growth and milestones of your mentorship in the Mentorships tab of the app, and see past or saved mentors as well.
I worked with our team’s data scientist to ensure program coordinators can access the most relevant information about their members.
Project takeaways
Learning to lead design
This first time not having a senior designer to support me along the whole way taught me to advocate for design on my own.
Learning to endure
This was the longest I had ever worked on a single project, it’s been a marathon and I’m glad to have committed this much time, love, and patience into a product I’m proud of.
Learning to pivot quick
Constant change pushed me to grow during times of uncertainty, I always needed to adapt to new business and engineering requirements.
