Role: Product Designer
Industry: Education / Mentorship / Services

Overview

Xperly is a dedicated on-demand career mentorship platform. It connects mentees to professional industry leaders in various fields for mentorship at anytime.

My role as a Product Designer in this project is to raise awareness of how useful mentorship can be and how both mentees and mentors can benefit from such activity.

“We created Xperly because we believe that everyone should have a mentor, and finding one shouldn’t be a time-consuming and stressful process. The platform allows for the fostering of long-lasting, mutually beneficial professional relationships between mentees and mentors”.

Problem

Mentorship requires consistant feedback and commitment. However, mentors are usually not financially compensated, and this makes them lose the motivation in providing consistant guidance. Also, it is really hard to regularly schedule with mentors because professional mentors usually have busy schedules and manually schedulling each call is a painful process. Moreover, it is hard to establish a formal relationship between mentors and students due to lack of channels and centralized online community.

Research

Just in North America there is a massive potential market for career mentorship services. Data from Ceridian shows that there are 53 million already-employed Canadians and Americans seeking better employment. Coupled with unemployment, there are over 60 million North Americans actively seeking new and better employment.

The current low rate of unemployment has not decreased the desire for new jobs; in fact it may have facilitated it further. With more jobs on the market many are feeling more empowered go about seeking ways of bettering their positions in the workforce.

New graduates are particularly ripe to benefit from career mentorship. Each year in Ontario there are over 30 thousand students graduating from University who, in the 6 month period after they graduate, will either completely fail to find employment or will settle for employment that is very mis-matched to the what they trained for. After two years those statistics improve. But not by much. Still 23 thousand are unemployed or in mis-matched professions.

In the United States it takes graduates an average of 6 months of serious searching to find employment, and even then a large amount enter into professions they’re overqualified for, with 43% of new graduates settling for jobs that don’t require degrees. Of that 43%, two thirds remain in non-degree requiring jobs for 5 years or longer. Even after 10 years more than 20% of graduates are still working non-degree jobs.

Competitive / Comparative Analysis

There are similar platforms existing that focuses on providing mentorship in general. To compare, I focused on navigation, payment system, and communication within the platform. Putting aside the outdated visuals, almost all of the existing platforms did not offer compensation to the mentors, nor way of communication other than "email with selected time slot".

Features

After our research and analysis, we decided to focus on offering easy scheduling system along method of payment to prioritize on both parties' pain points

Low Fidelity Website Design

Low Fidelity Mobile Design

Work Process

Current Progress

Become a Mentor Page

Programs Page

Mentor Profile Page

Publish a Program Page

Business Pitch Deck