Navigating academia can often be harder when you’re undocumented.
But it’s so much easier with the right mentor.
IHigh school and college are hard enough for most folks. But students who are also undocumented immigrants also face extra challenges on top of their group projects: they often lack familial support networks, are underestimated by academic staff and their peers, and face various forms of discrimination. This often leads to heightened anxiety and doubts when it’s time to move forward academically, such as applying to colleges.
A mentor can help fill in some of the gaps between undocumented students and their more privileged counterparts by offering support in navigating academia, whether it’s processes like college applications or social needs such as better communicating with teachers and family members.
Users: Undocumented high school and college students of Hispanic origin
Project type: Product design for web
Tools used: Miro, Figma
Common pain points: lack of family support, anxiety in moving forward academically, difficulty finding common ground with other students, systemic and interpersonal discrimination, and a lack of clear structure in finding the right mentor online
Problem: “How do we better match students with the right mentors online so they can find someone relatable, helpful, trustworthy, and motivating?”
The students in Adelante’s community had always been able to find mentors online, but only through a not-so-straightforward process that required reaching out to the organization with their information. Then, the organization would reach out to the student to figure out a match.
Such a process left too much room for delayed or missed responses and too much labor on the part of the organization’s staff. Adelante realized that the process could be more streamlined and structured, making it easier for the students to decide on the right mentor for them without being in contact with a staff member.
Reaching out to a stranger can be daunting enough. How might we create a process that’s more emotionally reassuring and inspire hope instead of trepidation?
The process:
To figure it out, we had to get to understand the organization and their students first. So we conducted informal interviews with the Adelante program managers, having deep conversations on their organization’s clients, mission, and values.
We also performed some research on what life is like for undocumented students in general and found:
Many undocumented students don’t trust teachers and other staff, fearing judgement on their undocumented status
30% of undocumented immigrants live below the poverty line and aren’t eligible for federal assistance
Many undocumented immigrants do not speak English well and cannot help their children with it, thus their children have to translate for them
Undocumented immigrants have higher rates of depressive symptoms and overall poorer mental health
Undocumented immigrants are significantly less likely to see out mental health services
Undocumented students may not seek out help in fear of being deported or stigmatized
In a 2019 study, many undocumented students reported feeling anxiety for pursuing a career in the future, financial strain, academic performance, and the safety of their families.
We then put together our findings on an empathy map:
The user personas
After compiling the research above from our meetings with staff members, we decided to take our understanding of our users a step further and created user personas.
While our users face similar struggles, by no means are they a monolith. We wanted to be sure our design catered to a diverse range of issues, so our student personas reflected different interests and life experiences.
Here’s one I made on my own, inspired by the stories of my own college classmates:
Even though our primary user base would be the students, we also created a profile for the mentors, who would be creating their own mentor profile.
The mockups
After developing a more in-depth view of our users, we developed high-fidelity mockups of some sample pages, including the page for mentor signups below.
We made sure to make the mentor signup link a prominent, large button so more prospective mentors would easily notice it and register its importance.
The reasons why mentorship is so critical is featured at the top to quickly help users understand this need, with success stories right below to serve as reassurance for anxious users and inspiration for everyone else.
We featured a sample of some of our mentors below to give users an example of the diversity of who a mentor can be.
For the perspective of our student users, we made a mockup of a mentor’s profile page that would satisfy their need to find a relatable mentor. I came up with a simple, easy-to-read design inspired by profile pages for medical professionals.
From learning about what the students are looking for most in a mentor, I decided to display significant details in a prominent manner that can be read with just a glance. This makes it quicker and easier for the students to learn how closely their potential mentors align with their goals and backgrounds. For example, a student seeking to major in software engineering may be more drawn to a mentor with the same or similar profession.
The user flow
Since we were limited on time with little bandwidth to design many screens, I created a user flow to show the process the mentees and mentors go through.
Based on the needs of the students, we decided that the mentor’s profile page should prominently display their:
Profession — students wanted to learn how to navigate their specific industry
Location — many students had limited access to transportation so would prefer someone close
Education — some students were looking to attend specific schools
Special skills and areas of knowledge — many students were looking for someone who could relate to their specific issues, as the students are not a monolith
LinkedIn page — a social media presence is always helpful to establish that you’re a real person
A space to show some personality! A friendly and relatable personality would help ease the anxiety many of the students reported.
Future (hypothetical) considerations
Because our time was so limited, we were not able to prototype the entire process we defined.
If we were to have more time to fully flesh out this project, we would:
Mockup the search page for mentors searching for mentees, and mentees searching for mentors
Conduct primary research with mentors and mentees, with a formal list of interview questions for each group. This way, we could determine any other steps that could be added to the user flow to meet user needs.
Conduct usability testing for both mentors and mentees: how do they feel during the search process? Are the filters able to provide the classification they need? How quickly could they determine whether a mentor or mentee was a prospective fit or not? What additional user information or step in the search process could be added to provide more accurate matches? How could be better structure the information architecture to answer the user’s questions without leading to information overload?
Ideate and prototype a way to personalize the onboarding procedure for both mentors and mentees to match them more accurately