BobaTalks
Creating an in-house scheduling tool to improve mentorship retention.
ROLE
Product Lead
TIMELINE
May 2024 - September 2024
TOOLS
Figma, Notion
SKILLS
Product thinking
User research
Management
The Problem
BobaTalks' current mentorship platform lacks a centralized scheduling tool to facilitate mentor-student interactions.
Because of this, each mentor of BobaTalks uses different, external applications for scheduling meetings with mentees, scattering communication. This leads to other issues for both mentors and mentees, such as no-shows, unproductive meetings, and burn out.
How might we help BobaTalks improve mentorship between students and their mentors?
USER RESEARCH
Competitive Analysis
We looked at the strengths and weaknesses of existing mentorship platforms and scheduling tools to brainstorm how we could design the best scheduling tool for BobaTalks. We were able to take inspiration from the user interface and user experience from these 3 competitors:
ADPList
Calendly
Cal.com
A DEEP DIVE INTO THE PROBLEM
Understanding our users
Target users: Students (mentees) and mentors
We decided to conduct user research to better understand the problem at a granular level and identify key user pain points and needs. We reached out to mentors and students in the BobaTalks community on Discord and LinkedIn: we sent a survey (51 students, 40 mentors) and completed 10 user interviews (4 students, 5 mentors). We synthesized the research and identified 3 key pain points users experienced with the current scheduling system:
Fragmented UX
No-shows
Unproductive meets
PRODUCT THINKING
Prioritizing key features
User research helped us understand the 3 main user pain points to solve for, and the competitive analysis of current scheduling tools helped us understand effective UI and features commonly used in these tools.
We brainstormed solutions to the 3 grievances, collaborating with engineers to gauge feasibility of implementation. We also got client feedback and considered business goals. Overall, we prioritized based on level of priority (user needs and business goals) and feasability.
Final Key Features
FAQ section
Expertise Tags
Google - authentication, calendar integration, and timezone syncing
Code of Conduct
Meeting Purpose
Fragmented UX
No-shows
Unproductive meets
How BobaTalks Works
Mentor Page
Students are able to read about the experience of a mentor before scheduling a talk with them. Features such as the FAQ and Expertise Tags aim to enhance meeting productivity.
Dashboard
Students are able to track, reschedule, and cancel any meetings easily. This dashboard is synced with their personal Google calendars, helping users keep track of their meetings, mitigating no-shows.
Booking Flow
Students sign up with Google and follow an intuitive, familiar process to schedule a suitable date and time to meet with their mentor. The required Meeting Purpose section enhances meeting productivity, and the Code of Conduct deters no-shows.
Learnings
Communicate constantly.
There were definitely a lot of times when communication could have been used to avoid issues. For example, one of our team members left after expressing other summer commitments, which meant that I had to assume her responsibilities. Additionally, another team member expressed a desire to take on more work a lot later in the project batch. As a product lead, it's important to check in and communicate with your team before issues arise.
Take initiative to learn.
Through this experience, I learned that taking initiative is one of the most important parts of learning the design process. Since we didn't have a ticketing system, many responsibilities were assumed by those eager enough to undertake the task. As a product lead, I saw that those who took initiative created the most impact and likely learned the most.
