Bloom
The Challenge
During a 3 day General Assembly X Adobe Creative Jam, my team and I were tasked with designing a third-party mobile app to help underrepresented creatives access hiring opportunities, showcases, communities and/or other resources that ultimately empower them and allow them to thrive.
The Community
Women in design.
According to AIGA, women only hold 4-11% of leadership positions in the design field. A 2018 McKinsey Study found that after a few years in the workplace, women begin to feel “the lack of mentorship, celebration of women’s work, support for mothers, and equal pay”.
The Solution
Bloom is a mobile app that aims to create lifelong mentorships between women in design and provide a space for women to uplift and inspire each other.
Too many times have we seen “pink” being the typical choice for things geared toward girls and women. For the color palette, I suggested purple as the primary color to the team. Purple represents ambition, creativity, and wisdom, which serves as a great reminder to our community that they all possess these traits. The color even represents the future, imagination and dreams, which are all things we want to nurture within our users.
Standard simplified sign up process requiring only full name, email and password.
Alice is our user for this flow, and she is seeking a mentor within our app. Alice will begin by filling out her profile and completing an assessment to gauge what her interests are.
The algorithm will use the assessment to provide Alice with several mentor matches who can help her with the topics she selected and skills she wants to improve on.
The animation for the loading screen gives Alice a visual cue that the matching process is occurring in the background and keeps her entertained during the wait.
Alice will go through the potential mentor pool and check out their profiles. She’ll take a look at Emilia’s.
Emilia’s skills and areas of expertise is a 78% match with what Alice hopes to learn more about and improve on, so Alice will send out an invite with a personalized message inviting Emilia to be her mentor.
Once Emilia accepts, Alice can chat with her and schedule a session. All interactions between mentee and mentor will occur within the app. Thinking about topics and questions can be tough, so the chatbot within the messaging system will provide suggested questions and prompts curated based on interests for Alice to ask.
A personalized experience with articles and topic deep dives based on Alice’s interests.
If Alice’s preferences and interests change, she can easily swap them out within her profile, and the app will readjust the homepage topics and experiences based on that. New mentors will also populate the “Explore” section as well to better match these new preferences.
Change and progress can only be made when there is accountability. To help with this, there will be a 6 month check-in within the app to ensure that the mentorship and goals are as expected for both mentees and mentors.
The Results
The Learnings
After being selected as a top 10 finalists, I presented our project to 3 judges in the industry, and we placed 3rd out of 103 teams!
Testing is a big part of UX, so I would have loved to test it out with potential users for feedback. One area that would be interesting to test is the wording for the “matching process”. While we thought the terminology would be a good call back to dating matching algorithms, we didn’t realize how some people’s viewpoint of the word could impact their perceptions of our app from the get go.
Tools: Adobe XD, Google Suite
Team: Pailin Chantravutikorn & Jenny Jiang