An app aimed at helping Santa Cruz students expand their professional network
Project Type
Class Project that resulted in a potential service/app idea for the non-profit Your Future Is Our Business (based in Santa Cruz, CA)
Tools
Figma
FigJam
Excel
Annota (Annotation SW)
Good ‘ol Paper & Pencil ;)
Duration
10 weeks
My role
I served as the Team Lead. I led the design process, involving product ideation, the visual design, and prototyping and testing. I played a core part in analyzing the data and wireframing our prototype.
Project Summary
Ascentia was a class project that revolved around the goal of helping Santa Cruz teachers and professionals create a stronger impact within CTE (Career Technical Education) programs and outreach. We made a classic mentorship app, but with a few interesting features, helping to achieve our "goal". While we did not have the time nor resources to develop the product completely, the base designs of Ascentia were received very well at the end-of-quarter project fair, with a number of non-profit executives and local entrepreneurs mentioning how user-friendly and well-designed our app was. 
The Problem
High school students often lack clarity about their future careers upon entering college, highlighting the need for proper mentorship and guidance. Further, the absence of specific industry experience among high school counselors and the lack of a dedicated platform for students to connect with industry professionals through their school's alumni network exacerbates this challenge.
But wait...
The Solution?
We hypothesized that by creating an app that facilitates mentor-mentee relationships and is integrated into the curriculum, high school students may find it more approachable and beneficial, compared to the intimidating nature of LinkedIn.
Timeline
Phase 1:
Needfinding
‍~ 2 weeks
Phase 1:
User Research
‍~ 2 weeks
Phase 2:
Ideation
‍~ 3 weeks
Phase 3:
Prototyping
‍~ 3 weeks
Objectives + Goals
Help Students
Assign mentors to students, based on some measurable degree of commonality, to encourage a quality match
Help YFIOB
Provide a portal for students to access the mentor network of YFIOB, to increase their impact in the schools they help
Make Networking Easy
Make networking look and feel like something students have seen before, i.e. an LMS (like Canvas or Google Classroom)
The Challenge
We analyzed transcripts from previous interviews provided by our professor, featuring educators from Santa Cruz County and executives from Your Future Is Our Business (YFIOB), to pinpoint specific issues in Career & Technical Education (CTE).
After analyzing and coding the transcripts for each interview, we organized our insights in the form of themes and subthemes in an affinity mapping-hybrid style.
The Solution
Phase 1: User Research & Needfinding
Upon synthesizing our findings, we observed a significant trend among our interviewees, highlighting a pressing need to enhance the connection between students and adults to support the holistic growth of every student, irrespective of their learning abilities.
Subsequently, we came up with four provisional personas to capture who we should ideate for. Each persona has a corresponding problem statement that includes their background, their goals, their problems, and their resulting sentiments.
A detailed look at each persona...
**Though we didn't analyze student interviews, we recognize high school students as our main focus, so we update our personas in Phase 3 accordingly.
Phase 2: Ideation
We began ideating by making 75 “How Might We” prompts and 150 solution concepts (2 for each HMW), after which we whittled down our ideas as a team, leaving us with 20 HMWs and 60 total ideas.
We discussed and debated over each of the 60 ideas, ending with us choosing three of our strongest solution concepts:
UPD8
(Born from the part-time teacher’s problem statement)
What it is...
UPD8 is an app based on the original couples’ app Tuned, created for schooling settings that allows users to update their teachers on their feelings and states of being specifically to allow teachers greater visibility into how their students are doing and to send their students motivating messages, either as a group notification or personal ones (should they choose to do so).
What we heard...
“...I want to know what's in their mind. I want to know what they're thinking. So usually, by the end of when they give me their feedback, it's usually like, Hey, I'm glad you're talking about this. This, you know, there should be more students talking about this. Nobody's afraid...”
“...I don't see him as a class, but I want to get to know them as people. I memorize each one of their names, and what they like or what they don't like, anything that can help me relate to that kid, or let me relate to the kid. So the student can feel like, Hey, this guy is showing me some love...”
Pentor
(Born from the CTE Teacher’s problem statement)
What it is...
PENTOR is a mentorship app that will help students have conversations with industry professionals within their field of interest. The mentor pool would be made up of the alumni network of the school, as well as the professional network of Your Future Is Our Business (YFIOB).
What we heard...
“So I think there's a whole lot of different levels, from counselors, to teachers to outside organizations, like yourself, and I think, some more support in being aware of the programs, helping students be aware of them, and showing what's out there and different internships or job opportunities would be really useful for a lot of high schoolers.”
How2Career
(Born from the CTE Administrator’s problem statement)
What it is...
Some students - particularly those that are first generation or from minority backgrounds - lack the resources and guidance necessary to transition into adulthood or higher education. This platform is meant to serve as a portal between parent and student, where they are presented with guided steps, discussion, and documentation, as well as deliverables, all of which will help maintain proper communication and understanding within the family, as well as help boost the student along their career path.
What we heard...
"So I know parents. I'm a dad. So I know parents are very busy nowadays. You know, they work long hours and it's hard sometimes for a parent to come home and be one-on-one involved with that that student is doing. I get that because I live my own life."
Phase 3: The Final Prototype
To begin Phase 3, we conducted interviews with four people that fell within our provisional personas.
We interviewed them with 3 goals in mind:
- Identify user pain points in relation to career exploration and mentorship
- Understand the norms of the teacher-student relationship within the traditional high school classroom
- Gauge the level of feasibility and interest in our three solution concepts
The following are interview snippets regarding the applicability of Ascentia – and some interesting points we hadn’t considered that gave us some sense of direction when we started the prototyping phase.
After the study, the general consensus was that Ascentia (aka Pentor) was the most relatable and essential product, given that they all rated Ascentia higher than the other two concepts.
Consequently, we updated our provisional personas from Phase 1 to best personify the possible target users for our app.
Once all our ducks were in a row, we began designing our Low Fidelity wireframes by first listing out 8 different user tasks, each of which came with its own user flow and Lo-Fi wireframe set.
The eight tasks were:
1. Student fills out a profile/onboarding form
2. Mentor fills out a profile/onboarding form
3. Student select what they need help with on the Home Page
4. Student select recommended mentors for the help they need
5. Student schedules a meeting with the mentor to discuss what they need help with
6. Student fills out “self-discovery” quizzes to discover areas of interest 
7. Student completes suggested tasks based on results of the self-discovery quizzes
8. Student links with mentors who provide feedback on completed tasks
We chose the user tasks above because our goal was to support marginalized and underrepresented high school students who needed help with CTE and career exploration.

At its core, our app was based around the idea of connecting students with adults who want to mentor students, providing help and guidance, as these students go through the college and career exploration process. As a result, we felt it important to include tasks that target these specific needs and actions.
The Hi-Fidelity Prototype
Each of the features in our prototype were designed to solve for some part of our challenge, our HMW statements, or the various needs of our provisional personas.
The Profile Questionnaire
🧠 The profile questionnaire is a direct solution to matching students with mentors with a high probability of success, collecting data in a number of fields (i.e. interests, plans, kind of help needed, etc.) to ensure a successful mentor match.
The Mentor Chat
🗣 The mentor chat creates a place where students and mentors can get to know each other before their relationship buds.
The Calendar
📅 The calendar was designed to encourage prioritization and organization, addressing the needs of first-gen. highschool students who have trouble keeping up with application dates or creating schedules. 
Conclusion
Project Fair Conclusions
After 10 weeks of work, it was finally time to present our final project to the class and other guests.
Our project garnered positive feedback overall, earning praise from numerous graduate students and non-profit guests for our design and efforts. Embracing the constructive critiques and diverse perspectives shared, we gained extremely valuable lessons. Despite the challenges encountered during the 10 weeks, instead of dwelling on defeat or attributing setbacks to external factors, we chose to view each obstacle as a chance to learn and grow.
Challenges & Lessons Learned
We spent so much time ideating and designing for the student perspective, we forgot about the mentor perspective. We should have thought about how to incentivize mentors to want to use our app, and not some substitute product (i.e. LinkedIn) to reach out to potential mentees.
Next Steps
- Design a mentor questionnaire and mentor-facing version of the app
- Develop the app
- Test the app with real highschoolers
Thanks for reading!