Alcye
A unique woman-specific mentorship platform built on the principle of reciprocity.
01: Overview
CONTEXT
Alcye is a networking and mentoring platform for women that puts emphasis on community by making it simple for users to connect regardless of geographic location. Alcye is unique because it's based on the idea of reciprocity. All users are both a mentor and a mentee so each person has an opportunity to give back while learning something new.
PROBLEM
The current site has limited overall features. There is no option to upload a profile picture, it doesn't highlight the reciprocity model well, and only general user profile information is available for other members to see.
GOAL
To redesign the homepage, login process, and community section of Alcye's site in order to make the platform model more clear and increase overall conversion.
MY ROLE
Designer and researcher
BUSINESS GOALS
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Increase sign ups
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Increase in group based mentorship (monetization model)
02: Discover
STAKEHOLDER MEETING
To further understand Alcye, the brand, and the stakeholders' business goals, my team and I met with the founder and CTO as the first step in our UX process. The meeting was extremely valuable and helped each of us get on the same page. During the meeting, we were informed that Alcye intended to shift their business model slightly by offering their services to women's groups in corporations, education, and other organizations as well as to individuals.
COMPETIVE ANALYSIS
To kick off the project, we did research on similar mentoring platforms to understand the market. I checked out the website for MicroMentor, which is tailored to entrepreneurs, but still has a model similar to Alcye.
The website does a good job of highlighting what skillset each user has or is seeking to learn. There's also a clear call to action button if a user wants to connect with another member.
Overall, the site seems to stick with the MVP (most viable product) of connecting a mentee/entrepreneur with a mentor without offering many other features. The lack of personal information provided by the users makes the experience feel somewhat like a transaction. The site's basic features and simple UI give off an industrial feel, which doesn't help it stand out among competitors.
CONCEPT MAP
By combining the findings from our competitive analysis with the information obtained during our stakeholder meeting, we dove into creating a concept map that helped us develop the questions for our user interviews.
USER INTERVIEWS
My team and I conducted a total of 9 user interviews, 3 of which I led. I began finding users by posting a qualifying screening survey on a closed women's Facebook group. I was able to connect with three women in their mid 20s, early in their career, and within the age range of Alcye's primary user base. I asked them a series of 25-30 questions to understand what makes them feel connected to a community, what skills they would be interested in learning and teaching, and what could improve networking for them.
Here's a chart from Google Surveys showing the ages of the users that replied to our screening survey. This helped us gain an even better understanding of the age range of Alcye's user base.
Below are a few direct quotes that stuck out from my user interviews.
"I would consider myself to be an introverted person, so structured networking is everything to me."
"The mentor/mentee relationship can often feel like some type of transaction. I'm most comfortable when I feel like the person mentoring me is someone I could hang out with."
"I feel connected to a community when it's an inclusive, supportive environment where everyone is clearly working toward the same goal."
03: Define
AFFINITY MAPPING
We were lucky enough to gather a large amount of data from users with diverse backgrounds. After synthesizing our findings, we had these major takeaways:
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Networking can feel transactional and users are eager to connect with a mentor that they could also see as a friend
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Being part of a supportive community that is working toward a common goal is vital
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Time and the level of commitment are top concerns when becoming a mentor/mentee
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MVP
After factoring in the major takeaways from our user interviews and necessary features that would allow Alcye to move in the right direction for their new group membership model, we narrowed down our MVP:
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Highlight how Alcye's mentoring model is structured
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Incorporate a sign up option for both individuals and groups while explaining the difference
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Build out a robust profile for each user so the entire experience between mentor and mentee feels more comfortable
04: Design
USER FLOW
This demonstrates the basic user flow for the community section of the site that I designed.
WIREFRAMES
I was excited to bring a humanistic approach to my designs by building out the community and profile pages. I wanted there to be one consolidated area for users to browse for other members, navigate to the inbox, and easily access specific forums by topic. For the profile, I wanted the user to feel connected with a member just by reading the information on their profile page.
Although Alcye had an existing forums section, it was limited. And because forums are an important feature for a community-focused platform, I wanted to organize them by topic and give users an easy way to locate them via the navigation bar.
For the communication portion of the site, I created a chat feature and a quick messaging option that would display as a modal and show a confirmation when a message is sent.
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TESTING
My team and I conducted a total of 5 usability tests, 2 of which I personally led, by
uploading our low fidelity wireframes into InVision to create a clickable prototype. We documented our findings on a rainbow spreadsheet by labeling each participant's observations a different color and number. For example, "P1" is usability test participant #1, and they had a total of 7 recorded observations.
During this phase, I tested out a chat feature that would expand and collapse in the bottom right of the screen as well as the modal message option that would appear when a user clicked the "message" call to action button. The modal was rated higher by users because it made the messaging flow more intuitive.
After testing, we made the appropriate changes to our wireframes which were carried over into our final visual comps.
STYLE TILES
My team and I were given the opportunity to also redesign the UI for Alcye's site. I tried to keep in mind the vision and tone of Alcye when creating the style tiles below. I was going for a more sophisticated, clean vibe in the first set, and for the second, I wanted the tone to be fresh and energetic.
The stakeholders chose a combination of the button and Roboto font I had selected, and the color palette and header created by my teammate.
Credit: Laura Fragoso
05: Deliver
FINAL DESIGN (MID-FI)
Below are the screens I created showing the community, profile, inbox, and forums pages. I incorporated the usability test findings by removing the chat feature, decreasing text size, and changing "start chatting" to "connect.
CONCLUSION
My team and I were able to create an entirely different, but improved user experience in a matter of only 3 weeks. The client was pleased with our redesign, which was extremely satisfying. We handed over all deliverables to Alyce so they could begin the implementation phase.
The most rewarding and time consuming part of this project was finding reliable participants and conducting user interviews. Given that we had a short timeline for this project, we were only able to allocate a few days to the research phase. I think we would have been able to gather even more insightful data if given the ability to interview more participants with varying demographic information.