In 2022, Transizion faced a pivotal challenge: their platform, CollegeRize, was struggling to keep up with the demands of their expanding company and planned B2B expansion.

• As a key team member, I led an ambitious project to overhaul CollegeRize and revolutionize the mentorship
  journey for college mentors, with the goal of empowering and elevating the mentorship experience for students and parents.

• Our mission was to create a game-changing platform that would meet the needs of our users and exceed their expectations.

User Goals:

Design an intuitive and efficient way for Mentors to,

• Register and get onboarded

• Track hours

• View student profiles

• Plan and organize students' journeys

• Track students' progress

• Recommend additional services

Business Goals:

Create a platform that is,

• Stress-free

• Organized

• Efficient

We improved Transizion college mentors workflow by -

• Having a central place with all the tools they need to help their students complete their college prep journey

• Having the administrative functions and mentorship specific functions separated and categorized by importance

Which helped Transizion, the stakeholder, be more efficient in tracking and facilitating business needs and goals.

• CollegeRize Mentors had a complicated and confusing user experience when trying to complete their tasks due to unclear menu options and multiple pathways leading to the same destination, which caused cognitive overload and added to confusion.
  

• We discovered that essential tools required to accomplish their mentorship duties were not integrated into the CollegeRize platform, necessitating the use of external tools.

Our analysis of the CollegeRize platform found that mentors face a cumbersome and error-prone workflow, as they are required to frequently switch between various tools and platforms to complete tasks. Moreover, they are saddled with repetitive administrative work, further increasing their workload.

With the limited amount of time and resources, we decided to conduct interviews with four mentors to validate our initial findings and dig deeper into what pain points, needs and additional requests they may have.

Pain Points:

• Disparate and complex workflows

• No simulataneous viewing of students Communication

Based on our findings, we created a user persona to better understand the needs and behaviors of our target users.

The data collected from the interviews not only validated our initial findings but also provided additional insights that can help us improve our design.

To alleviate mentors pain points and adhere to their requests, we decided to:

• Divide and group features into main menus and supporting sub menus

• Add a Dashboard

  - With snap shots of frequently used menus

  - Overview of important info

  - Helpful Links to frequently used menus

• Group Mentee specific features under Mentee Main Menu
  - Snap shots of mentees’ progress

  - Overview of To-Do’s and Timesheet

  - Mentee List

• Add a Switch Pod function on top of each page
  - Easy access to different Mentee Pods

Amid testing the usability, we realized our design had crucial flaws and needed to be iterated. We quickly went to work and designed a mid-fi wireframes with the data we collected from the initial usability testing.

We revamped the site's design approach by dividing the main menus into "Administrative Functions" and "Mentee Specific Functions," eliminating sub-menus to reduce confusion and cognitive overload. By grouping the main menus under two categories, we were able to streamline the user experience. Additionally, we restructured the Mentor Dashboard to showcase only the most vital information to the users.

Although the iterated design improved usability, more areas needed fixing and additional features were necessary. We conducted another round of iteration and incorporated the style guide I created to finalize the hi-fi prototype.

Usability testing and client feedback have revealed that the design needs an update to improve hierarchy, balance, contrast, and consistency. The finalized style guide prioritizes a consistent and tailored approach to typography, color, iconography, main menu navigation, and the grid system.

Key Design Principles

• Improve usability

• Collaborative design decisions made across teams

• Use of typography, color, iconography, main menu navigation and the grid system

• Customizable design system

Using the style guide on the updated wireframes had proved to be beneficial in improving the usability even further. Final touches were made and the result was a success.

Lead Product Designer working with -

• Project Manager & UX Writer

• UX Researcher

• Product Designer

In addition, I participated in -

• Initial research

• User Interviews

• Data analysis and synthesis

• User testing