Ask it is an interactive community for women in tech to ask and receive professional or personal advice. With Ask It, aspiring women in tech have increased access and visibility into a network of women who have followed their paths to entrepreneurship. By gaining access to this excusive network of women in high tech positions or VC firms, anyone can gain experiences relating to their unique identities and questions along the entrepreneurial journey. I designed the web app that won the Best Design Award in hackathon and continued to work in it as a personal project to build the mobile app, tailored it to entreprenerus.
Role — Solo UX Designer (with mentor guidance)
Duration — August 2018 - December 2018 (4 weeks)
Scope — Research, information architecture, visual design, prototyping, user testing
More and more women are intersted in entreprenurship year over year, but it can be an intimidating process, with much room for advocacy, exposure and mentorship. In order to understand more about how early-stage entrepreneurs navigate their journey, I spoke to incredible 6 early— later stage or aspiring entrepreneurs. I recruited them from facebook groups Women In Product and Girl, ask it. I adapted the interviews based on relevance, and focused the conversation around mentorship.
It’s hard to find groups for women ages 18-35 that aren’t overly formal, cluttered with information. It canbe an intimidating process, with much room for advocacy, exposure and mentorship. -Selene, raised 1M seed round from Sequioa
Overall: Female entrepreneurs don't have concrete information at various stages of their 0-> 1 journey. There is an overload of information across the internet, but the quality and nuances needed are unavailable and left to chance at every step.
I compared several other products to compare their unique offerings in terms of mentorship that they offer to early-stage entrepreneurs and how they approach mentorship.
Enable collaboration through a trusted agent. Users can build trust at every step of the process by receiving curated information from experts.
Identify and remove barriers to do research upfront. Ask it will offer guidelines, tips and other etiqutte tips around mentorship so that the right expectations are at the right time.
Reward kindness and consistency. Ensure that the answerers and askers are apppropriately rewarded for their time.
We believe that Askit will expose all female entrepreneurs to experiences relating to their unique identities and questions along the entrepreneurial journey.
Storyboard created using Storyboard That
There are a multitude of opportunities that we could work on, but I chose to focus on the following primary flows--onboarding (both from a mentee and a mentor perspective), viewing discussions in the forum and reaching out to mentors to begin to forge a connection.
The design relied heavily on the users to provide a lot of information upfront. If users don’t fill out a lot of details, the matches won’t be acccurate.
Users preferred to reveal pitch decks in private, after they have established a rapport.
Build trust by being consumption oriented.
Below are the final screens for onboarding as well as the use of chatbot. Users will see the chatbot as a guided tour after they land in the home screen.
Users will see the chatbot instead of the guided onboarding once they sign up. If they skipped the chatbot during onboarding,they will be prompted to access and use in their home page during first use, and can be accessed from the profile page. During user testing, users found this conversational way to engage with the app enjoyable, and liked having control over when they want to access the chatbot.
There needed to be a clean and easy way to view discussions as they are the backbone of the app to gain trust with the system. The importance of participating and setting right expectations is accomplished by the filters or chat bot. Once users have selected their categories, they can be matched with important information on their desired topics.
Ask it offers an easy way to view and select probable mentors, tailored by availability, interests and experience mentoring others. This is accessible from their profiles page. Profile cards with a swipe feature can allow users that are busy to quickly dismiss or add to message requests for contacting later.
After the first round of research, users found that there is no easy way for users to be engaged in the platform other than to message mentors or ask questions. For the final designs, I re-designed the experience to be search friendly.
In addition to the original idea of quickly matching with mentors, the platform will allow users to filter information based on where they are in the journey as well their topic sof interest.
Both mentors and mentees can have 1:1 feedback with approved connections in order to continue their conversations. to prevent a lot of requests to the same mentor, the app will provide invite requests that expire after a certain time.
This is based on the idea of the time-sensitive nature of 1:1 feeedback.
There are several iterations that could be psosible for this prototype. If implementing search and filters are complicated, there could be other ways to match mentors i.e. second/ third degree connections There is no scheduling and calendar managing featues for users to interact with real-time, and is a logical next step. Ask it would possibly need full-time staff or volunteers who will curate and manage content from various sources as well as raise awareness for upcoming events.
Designed and hand-coded with ♥️ byMeera Ramachandran © 2021. Built using Simple Grid. Deployed with Netlify.
