Product design · End to end
Removing the obstacles between students and the mentors who could actually help them.
Context
Mentorship matters for personal and professional growth, but finding the right mentor is unreasonably hard. Guidr connects mentees and mentors across fields based on mutual interests, challenges and goals, while keeping the interaction safe and the commitment realistic.
I managed the entire design process for this product, from user research and product strategy through interaction design, visual design and branding. The project split into two sides, mentees and mentors. This case study follows the mentee side.
Idea synthesis
Across every panel I attended, one question kept coming up: what was the biggest challenge you faced early in your career, and how did you get past it? The answer kept repeating. People found someone who had already been there.
That is a solvable problem, and the existing tools were not solving it.
The problem
Partial solutions exist, but each one puts a different barrier in front of someone looking for a mentor. Together they add up to a search that most students give up on.
A professional network that connects people to wide-ranging industry contacts.
Official channels provided by institutions to support student needs.
Structured initiatives designed to provide goal-oriented guidance.
Product goal: one place where finding a mentor who matches your interests is easy, personal and trustworthy.
User research
We ran in-depth qualitative interviews with twelve potential users, students and professionals from a range of academic and career backgrounds, over video calls. Afterwards we built an affinity map to find the themes that repeated.
Framing
The affinity map gave us themes. How Might We questions turned those themes into design problems we could actually solve.
Create a personalised matching system that aligns mentors and mentees on academic and personal interests, career goals and preferred communication methods?
Provide guidance for common obstacles like internships, career planning and adapting to new environments, alongside tailored advice for specific challenges?
Build in tools that support skill development: project collaboration, feedback, and access to workshops and talks by people working in the field?
Create a community that encourages open dialogue and shared experience, particularly for users with specific interests like sustainability or technology?
Product constraints
Designing the main flow meant keeping it straightforward for first-time users. Naming what the product refused to do was the fastest way to keep the flow honest.
Wireframing
The initial wireframes outlined the basic structure and user flow. These went through many iterations to settle the layout and improve usability before any visual design started.
Visual design ideation
The onboarding questions started as text options with one-line captions. Content felt crowded and the two roles were easy to confuse.
Adding icons to distinguish the mentor and mentee roles made the layout immediately more scannable. It is a small change that decided whether the first screen worked.
The fix was not more copy. It was giving the two choices different shapes.
Interaction design
The hardest moment in any mentorship product is the first message. People stall, not because they do not want help, but because they do not know how to open.
The chat screen includes a conversation starter that generates personalised prompts from both profiles and shared interests, so the blank box is never the first thing a user faces.
Final designs
Reflection
Guidr was the first product I took from a question at a career panel all the way to a working high fidelity prototype, on my own. The research was the part that changed the outcome most: without the twelve interviews I would have built a directory, and a directory was exactly what people already had and were not using.
The other lesson was about constraint. Writing down what the app was not going to be kept the flow short enough that a first-time user could finish it. That instinct, decide what to leave out before you design what to put in, is the one I use most often now.