Reflecting on Spring Semester & Charting the Course Ahead
The Magic Pals are back again with another update! We’ve successfully wrapped up the spring semester as well as Sprint 6, and we’re slowly gearing up for another exciting semester ahead.
Reflecting on our spring semester
We completed both our spring presentation and collaborative session on May 1st, which marked the end of the spring semester. When returning for the summer semester, our team engaged in deep reflection and planning to ensure that we’re fully prepared to tackle The Mentoring Partnership’s high-priority challenges. Our goal is to address these challenges and deliver impactful solutions that align with TMP’s mission and our goals.
Our close collaboration with TMP continues to be a guiding force as we navigate the complexities of integrating advanced technologies with human-centered design practices to ensure we meet both the needs of clients and their customers. Within our collaborative session, we had a chance to meet and elicit feedback from two board members as well as the full TMP staff team, which led to many insightful discussions. Some of the topics discussed included:
- The balance between human interaction and AI assistance
We examined how leveraging AI technologies can enhance efficiency and scalability, while recognizing the huge value TMP’s vast networks provide to mentoring programs. In the coming months, we plan to find the optimal balance between these two elements to provide a mentorship experience that is technologically advanced but also deeply human-centered.
2. Importance of alignment with TMP’s brand and reputation
During our collaborative session, some valid concerns were raised about the potential of some prototypes to provide misinformation, which could be harmful to TMP’s reputation. Moving forward, we will actively identify and mitigate the potential risks of our prototypes.
3. Integration with TMP’s current service ecosystem
Our team agrees that a potential integration into TMP’s ecosystem would maximize collective impact. This is an area we want to explore further with technical experts as we dive into the design stage of our design process.
What’s next for the summer ahead?
In the upcoming months, we are excited to build upon the foundations laid during our spring collaboration with TMP.
Our mission is clear: We want to expand education for mentoring programs with increased access to relevant and timely support without overburdening TMP’s small team.
As we progress, we will converge and diverge simultaneously and repeatedly to refine and innovate design solutions.
During the converging stage, we will be refining prototypes to ensure they meet TMP’s objectives and address the specific needs of mentoring programs. This will allow us to prioritize the most impactful ideas and focus our efforts on refining and implementing them.
We plan on continuing to use human-centered design and research practices to consider the unique dynamics of the mentoring field and the valid human preferences many programs and users have as we iterate on our solutions. Potential prioritization efforts could include using a Desirability vs. Feasibility matrix, assessing the biggest risks of each prototype, thematic analysis of user testing with stakeholders, and more.
Reframing the goal of this project
As part of our capstone lecture, we reframed the goal of our project using abductive reasoning to align better with our research. This allowed us to reflect on the value behind our design and think deeply about the converging process of prototypes.
Ultimately, the value we aim to create through our project is to empower mentoring programs to feel confident in accessing and using TMP resources, ensuring they derive more value from these resources. By continuously iterating on our ideas and incorporating diverse perspectives, we are confident in our ability to deliver impactful results for TMP.
Diverging our ideas
At the beginning of the summer, we also recognized the need to broaden our creativity with prototype ideas and engaged in various brainstorming activities, ensuring we explored a broader range of ideas beyond our initial digital and AI-centered concepts.
We started off by reflecting on and refining the existing prototypes. We discussed their potential risks, assumptions, and what we could test through prototypes using the data we collected from the collaborative session with TMP staff and board members. From there, each team member contributed new ideas and possible features for our existing prototypes.
In addition, we also conducted a service design workshop to generate more ideas by applying concepts like dematerialization, liquification, and re-bundling. We gained inspiration from Richard Normann’s “Reframing Business: When the Map Changes the Landscape.” We looked analogous domains such as e-commerce and retail, where successful companies like Amazon and Sephora have a constellation or suite of products and services similar to TMP. This approach fueled reflection on how our existing solutions effectively bundle TMP’s services and create more visibility and timely access, which helped us generate more ideas.
These approaches allowed us to think expansively while remaining within the scope of our mission and design principles (access, relevance, timely). We narrowed down to 7 ideas to prototype, which include:
- User Profile/Account within the website
- Resource personalization for mentoring programs
- Chatbot on the website
- Mentoring program networking hub
- Co-working sessions for mentoring programs
- Direct reach-out to other programs
- Comments across website
Parallel prototyping, concept testing, and more research about user behaviors
To gather feedback and data to support and iterate upon our initial ideas, we plan on conducting research and design activities simultaneously. We will be parallel prototyping our ideas and testing the risks associated with each of them before we move further. With the help of our faculty, Jess and Ben, we clustered the 6 prototypes into 5 concepts and distilled the underlying assumptions to test, ensuring we were designing the right solutions. We will be conducting concept validation on all of them and implementing a live version of 4 of them to understand peoples’ interest and perceived value of our prototypes.
At the same time, we have conducted an internal heuristic evaluation of the website and are currently conducting usability testing with mentoring organizations. This will help us discover how mentoring organizations interact with the research resources that TMP promotes and maintains on its website. Understanding their mental models and needs around navigating mentoring resources will ensure that solutions, especially AI or website-related ones, will add more value to TMP.
Next steps
To move full steam ahead, we are clear on our goal and mission. In the next two weeks, we anticipate more concept validation sessions, user interviews, and exploration of more analogous domains to further enhance our solutions. Additionally, we have planned an AI workshop to explore ways to integrate AI in line with our human-centered design principles.
See you in two weeks!
