Graditude

Help students develop impactful career mentorship relationships.

Graditude is a nonprofit platform connecting students with alumni for career mentorship, in partnership with campus organizations.

Role

UX Designer: Led a team of 3 junior designers under the guidance of the ceo, full-time designer, and developer

Context

Started Fall 2024, Internship

Tools

Figma, FigJam, Google Docs

Team

1 CEO, 1 Design Lead, 1 Developer, 3 Junior Designers

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Problem

Graditude's admins need more support.

Admins struggle to effectively manage mentorship programs due to limited visibility into participant engagement, which lead to poor outcomes and discouraging program launches.

Solution

A centralized dashboard that allows admins to view and understand their programs.

Admins now have a central dashboard to track member engagement and intervene as needed throughout the mentorship lifecycle, with early priorities focused on Recruiting, Matching, and Solidifying.

Outcome

Successful stakeholder presentation and dev handoff

During the last days of my internship, I delivered a stakeholder presentation that communicated my solutions to the dev of the project, setting the team up for implementation.

View CEO Testimonial

Project Process

Empathy and research

Stakeholder Interview and Past Documentation

I talked to the CEO, Steven, to truly understand the business needs and admin's needs to improve program success, ultimately supporting Graditude's overall operations. The following were his intentions for the dashboard, as well as insights taken from interview transcripts from people interested in being a program admin.

See who signs up, and invite different types of members if needed.

Spot which matches engage, and nudge the matches that don’t.

Track match progress and follow up on stalled matches.

View updated program goals and follow up on stagnant relationships.

User Journey

After consolidating existing documentation and defining our approach, I created a detailed user journey for our example admin, “Carol.” This journey illustrated Carol’s workflow, challenges, and decision points, helping stakeholders visualize her needs and guiding the design of dashboard features to support her actions effectively.

Define

User Persona

Based on our business goals and existing admin interview transcripts, we created a focused user persona: Carol Thompson, a mentorship program coordinator, who struggles to track mentor–mentee engagement and know when to intervene. The Admin Dashboard solves this by giving her real-time visibility into match activity and progress toward goals, enabling quick, targeted actions that keep programs on track and deliver stronger outcomes.

User Flow

Our "Nudge" flow allows admins to quickly identify low-engagement or underperforming mentor–mentee matches from the Admin Dashboard, select them, and send targeted notifications. By streamlining the process into just a few steps, admins can efficiently re-engage pairs before progress stalls, which ensure that mentorship programs stay active and productive.

Defining Roles

To further define our scope and ensure that our plan was a comprehensive solution for Graditude's mission of providing admins with the tools they need to manage mentee/mentor matches, I took ownership over the main dashboard, inviting new members flow, creating new programs flow, and making sure that we had clear action items before and after our weekly meetings.

Iteration

Sketching and Wireframes

I hosted a fast sketching exercise just to get an idea of the core functionality of the dashboard and foster creativity in our approach when designing for low to high fidelity. Our primary goal was to allow the admin to:

View mentor and mentee analytics
Track engagement
Nudge and/or set reminders
Invite prospective members
Create matches

Main Dashboard

After we presented our low-fidelity wireframes to the CEO, we designed for gaps in our designs, including:

Navigation

Enhancing the side nav bar to include not only members and mentors, but also giving admins access to programs

Data Display

Including more positive metrics such as total numbers, active participation rates, and overall satisfaction instead of purely negative such as # of inactive members

Feature Consolidation

Consolidating features such as analytics and managing invites on one page to enable quicker decision-making for admins

Usability Testing

My team and I conducted a usability test with our high fidelity design, where we found that we needed to:
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Clarify labels and metric definitions throughout the dashboard.
Replace IDs with names or profile photos for better context.
Reconsider navigation and terminology for Matches/Notifications.
Provide shortcuts or direct paths for program creation and related actions.

Design

Giving Admins Clarity

Through my dashboard design, admins can now create new programs, engage with their programs' members, and view selected statistics to keep track of their programs' progress.

Final Prototype

Reflection and the future

Learnings

Stakeholders and User POVs

For a design to be successful, I needed to balance what the CEO wanted, past user research, and usability test results. What helped me the most was sorting stakeholder/business and users' needs and connecting them based on pain points and objectives of the tool.

Consistency and Organization

Since this was a remote internship across multiple time zones, organization was key to the project’s success. By managing action items, coordinating meetings, and updating the CEO weekly, I kept my team productive despite being 2000+ miles apart!

Designing for an Internal Tool

Having only worked on consumer-facing products, designing for admins was a refreshing new challenge. This project really pushed me to draw on my own club leadership and internal tool experience to better empathize with admins' unique needs.

In the future I'd want to include more features that would provide admins with the personalization they need to really cater to their specific program, such as options for different views (tiled, lists) or even options to customize their dashboard through dynamic cards. I'm so glad that I got to design for data, and this really sparked my interest in designing for admin-facing tools!