Wow-men
Connect. Learn. Grow.
WOW-MEN is a platform that connects young women of all genders with mentors that match their personalized learning styles to facilitate personal and professional growth.
My Role
UX / UI designer, User Research, Wireframe and Prototype,
Interviews & testing
​
Conceptual project
​
Tools
Miro
Figma
G-Suite
Slack
Duration
2 months
Team
Location
Barcelona Technology School
Date
Fall 2020
Project Overview
Design Challenge
How might we empower women in their career path?
Mission
At WOW-MEN! our mission is to build gender equity within workplaces and empower all historically excluded genders in their various career paths by building a diverse community of support, education, and collaboration.
Vision
We aim to to diversify workspaces and leadership by offering resources for professional development such as: talks, meetups, learning modules, articles, and a mentorship program for historically excluded genders.
Research methodos
Discover
-
Trend Research
-
Desk Research
-
Benchmarking
-
Survey
-
In-depth Interviews
-
P.O.E.M.S.
Ideate & Define
-
Crazy 8's - Massive Ideation
-
Box Stimuli
-
Co-creative Journey Maps
-
Affinity Mapping
-
Personas
-
Empathy Maps
-
Customer Journey
Design
-
Sketching
-
Wireframe
-
Mid-fidelity interface
Discover
Research
In recent years there has been a consistent improvement in the position of women in society and every year more women are choosing to pursue higher education.
​
Despite that, globally in 2020, less than half (46%) of all women participate in the work force.
​
Mothers are less likely to be employed compared to fathers and women without children.
Furthermore, data shows that only 23% of women hold executive and leadership positions. (link)
0.1%
Of creative agencies are founded by women & non-binary people.
7%
Of venture capital investments goes to women entrepreneurs.
19.3%
Occupy executive
roles in EU.
7.9%
Occupy CEO positions.
Competitors analysis
Organizations that supports women worlwide
-
Peru
-
Talent programs
-
Digital transformation
-
Connect students with opportunities
-
Los Angeles
-
Community
-
Professional network
-
Career guide
-
Live events & talks
-
Brazil
-
Podcast
-
Work
-
Personal life
-
Gender
-
Barcelona
-
Presential & online courses
-
Women in technology
-
280 cities worldwide
-
Diversity
-
Community
-
Live events & talks
Survey
100 participants
-
Most of our respondents are female under 34 years old
​
-
We found that even those who aren't interested in executive roles still want the opportunity to grow and lead
The main problems in advancing in the career path were the following:
Not enough professional
development opportunities
Not enough professional
development opportunities
Not enough support from management or leadership team
Lack of available growth in current position or company
Interviews insights
-
Companies and leaders need to listen, support, and make room for growth.
-
Women feel empowered when given responsibility.
-
Personality and learning styles matter.
-
Self knowledge is essential for success.
-
Market knowledge is fundamental in growth.
"I can't help but think that if I had done a mentorship program, then maybe I would have positioned myself better to deal with difficult situations."
-Female Interviewee
User Personas
We created two types of User personas, one for the Mentor and one for the Mentee to identify our target audience
Customer Journey
We conducted multiple session to create a user journey both for the Mentor and the Mentee.
Mentee
Mentor
Ideation
Negative Brainstorming
Starting from our HMW question we created a negative version of it: "HMW ruin women in their career path?" in order to get a different perspective and identify critical areas to stay away during our ideation.
Box Stimuli
As a second step we used the technique of Box stimuli to look for unconventional ideas. The exercise consisted in finding association between the theme of the project and a random object, in this case we choose "the glasses".
Insights:
-
create a community and build connections
-
Include HR
-
Build an environment of protection and support
-
Create a learning system that needed to be personalized for each mentee
​
Crazy 8's
Finally we conducted a Crazy 8's exercise to push us even further beyond our firsts ideas and than compare the results inside the team and combine the workable ideas to refine them in the prototype.
Ideal proposal
Mentor Match Machine is a key feature of the WOW-MEN platform that pairs a mentee with a mentor based on previously determined career interests, growth goals, and learning/support styles for a formal, one-on-one mentorship (virtual or in-person).
Final Outcome
User Interface
At this point we tryed to imagine how the Mentor Machine would look like. This was the first attempt to develop our idea and visualize WOW-MEN service.
Learnings and Takeaways
In this project, we learned different ideation techniques as negative brainstorming and box stimuli. We also understood the importance of exploration and ideation to achieve a more detailed result, and how to combine multiple different ideas in one viable solution.