MirrorU

Inspiration

As soon-to-be new graduate students, our and others' stories show that transitioning to a new working environment can be challenging and even traumatic. This experience is commonly known as imposter syndrome or feelings of identity inadequacy, and it happens more often for women and minority groups in predominately white- and male-controlled academic fields. Solutions addressing this issue include providing mentorship and connecting with others that share a similar experience or identity. Despite academic publications and advocations on this topic, we've never seen a project that served this specific purpose. A desire to make changes in this area had driven us to design MirrorU, a mobile platform to support underrepresented individuals entering new working environments by creating a community for workplace newbies.

What it does

MirrorU is a mobile application that includes a mentor-mentee pairup system and an anonymous community-building hub.

The mentor-mentee pairup system helps find and connect with tutors. The system accommodates specific needs of tutees by providing personalized filtering and suggestions. Once a user finds someone that they want to connect with, they can start a casual conversation or book a slot for one-on-one meetings.

The anonymous discussion panel creates a safe space for questions, encouragement, discussions and experience-sharing. Members of our community will be able to post, view, save or like a post. The hub includes a search engine that helps locate specific discussions, and will have tags to filter posts in specific areas.

How we built it

To begin refining our understanding of the problem, we conducted primary research through interviews with 3 users in our target demographic about their identity-based, confidence-related challenges in the workplace. We also consulted academic journals and papers as a form of secondary research. Finally, we designed and built the prototype on Figma.

Challenges we ran into

Perhaps the most challenging and fun part of a designathon is that we need to turn our ideas into concrete products. Once we had the idea of designing an app about imposter syndrome, an immediate need is to look for solutions on how to solve the problem of imposter syndrome itself. Given the limited amount of time that we have, we quickly decided that we will head in two directions: conducting interviews and doing academic research.

We also struggled with sorting out what kind of interactions are most important and what features do we want to have, in order to serve our purposes based on our initial research. This is an ongoing process. We brainstormed and consulted with mentors, but were also constantly making changes to make our product more accessible and helpful to its users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having observed a lack of resources that support minority groups at work, we are excited to design MirrorU, with an ultimate goal of providing an encouraging and welcoming community externally. Based on this core value, we are proud to have included the following features that are uncommon to similar mentor apps: first, a personalization feature to help pair up tutors and tutees. Second, a community-building hub to create inclusivity. And most importantly, being able to design a solution inspired from our research and user interviews.

Our personalization feature takes into account some aspects that a tutee may need from their tutor, including expertise, identity, field, level, and pronouns. This feature will pair up tutees and tutors by accommodating specific needs and emphasis. We observed that such a feature is not common in regular mentoring pair-up applications, which commonly filter by review and numbers of service.

We came up with an idea to combine anonymous community-building with mentorship, because both aspects are important in providing support to our target group. We also hope that this feature can be helpful for people with different social and communication needs, and find some good resources in place as they start using our product.

What we learned

Through working on this program and talking to our target audience, we gained a better understanding of the major challenges in the imposter syndrome that underrepresented groups face when first entering the workplace. Interviewing actual users gave us insight and allowed us to understand the problem more deeply, and feel more empathetic towards the users and problem itself. Additionally, the general process of UI design with a focus towards clarity and accessibility further helped us to refine our features to best serve our mission.

What's next for MirrorU

Moving forward, we hope to consult with psychologists, educators and more target users for feedback and further refining the target problem so that MirrorU can best support a community. Ultimately, we'd love to clarify and further develop our prototype to be able to officially launch the product and empower others to break free of conformity.

Built With

• figma