THE CHALLENGE

BridgeGood wants early stage creatives to be better prepared for involvement with small business projects through “mentorship”. When you think back to your first days of starting something new, you don't know where to begin. You didn't know if your work was good enough. You had a lot of questions, but you didn't know who to ask. You wanted to get feedback but you didn't know if something was ready to share. BridgeGood is where we can make connections with young designers and mentors. 

Drawings by Louisa Liu

THE TASK

The goal was to create a simple functional online only "mentorship" feature that connected young designers with "mentors". This feature will help prepare a young designer to share their portfolio with the industry. As an additional task, we were asked to think about the scope and the word mentorship. What is the real meaning behind the word mentorship? 

THE SOLUTION

BridgeGood Advisors enable early stage creatives to show their design process and improve on their portfolio projects through directed, constructive feedback. 

RESEARCH

UNDERSTANDING OUR USERS

We were given access to current BridgeGood mentors, creatives and board members. We interviewed them to understand what they thought about mentoring and what they expect out of a platform like BridgeGood. We also wanted to know what their potential concerns were about a commitment to mentoring someone.

From our survey data and interviews we were able to come to 2 conclusions.

1. Potential advisors want to help young designers prepare for the future

• Potential advisors want to have face to face contact with beginning designers.
• They want to hear and see their progress after giving feedback.

2. The biggest concern for a potential advisor is time commitment.

• With their own careers, an advisor's schedule can vary.
• They don't know when they would find the time to meet.
• Young designers want to feel the same kind of effort from the advisor as they are giving them.

UPLOADING A PROJECT

In the upload page a creative is prompted to fill in a few questions about their project. These questions allow her to reflect on her project and her process. It will help tell her story. She also has to be specific about what she wants to be given feedback on. This will allow for clear, direct feedback. 

ADVISOR'S FEEDBACK

This page is where the advisors can give feedback to a creative based on the information given. It states how many days left they have on this project and the specific items they want to be reviewed on. A simple drop down menu item would allow quick feedback for the advisor and an additional comment section that gives them the opportunity to write more if they want. From there, they would be able to say "keep improving" or "ready to publish".