Opal's Problem
College students need a simple way to gain access to mentors within their aspiring career fields.
~ 76%
of students think career mentors are important in their lives.
~ 37%
of students actually have a mentor to turn to for career advice.
~ 14%
of mentor relationships started by asking someone to be their mentor.
Goal
Create onboarding screens for the students that are looking for mentors in order to:
Clearly explain how the app works, ensuring students make the most out of the apps features.
Make onboarding intuitive, minimizing frustration and ensuring students complete the setup process.
Provide a introduction that encourages students to actively participate and using the platform.
Research
The primary user group identified was college students who are looking for mentors on social media platforms.
Pain points included:
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Time Commitments - potential mentors are very busy with current commitments.
Overdependence - students tend to over rely on mentors.
Unreal Expectations - students need to have clear mentoring ground rules.
Lack of Outcomes - students need a strict outcomes they set to achieve.
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Low Fidelity Design Process
Approach
I designed the onboarding screens keeping in mind to prioritize giving users a simple explanation of how the app worked. This also helped with creating the right visual graphics of what students can do on the app to address their current pain points.
Some feedback from rounds of usability testing included:
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Users prefer illustrations over screen layout explanations.
Users want onboarding screens on an app to tell a full story.
Users want more consistency within a set of onboarding screens.
Final Screen Flow
Results & Retention
Impact
Unfortunately, I cannot provide statistics of how these onboarding screens impacted student data as the company was still creating their beta mobile app when I wrapped up my role at Opal. It was just too early to measure impact. I can confirm that as of late 2021 Opal partnered with Santa Clara University to test run their program with the school of engineering (estimation of 1,000 students) where these screens were used.
If I were to continue working on task I would:
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Regularly review user data to identify future onboarding screen pain points.
Continue to update to onboarding screens if new features are added to the app.
Provide an option to skip onboarding if user is already familiar with the app.
