Young women entering the STEM fields don’t have a strong network to lean on. They often feel discouraged due to a lack of support or go through unfair experiences and ultimately change career paths. 

We created Ada to help young women beginning their careers to easily discover potential role models and mentors in one place, and allow them to choose who to go to for guidance. Meeting these experienced professionals in accessible places provides value to young women, helping them expand their network and build meaningful relationships.

Out of all possible reasons for women changing their career paths or not pursuing a job in the STEM fields, we wanted to focus on two in particular that seemed favorable to tackle the fastest: 
- Lack of Role Models
- Lack of Resources

 

Young women entering the STEM fields don’t have a strong network to lean on. They often feel discouraged due to a lack of support or go through unfair experiences and ultimately change career paths. 

 

 

I interviewed 8 women ages 18-25. Of the 8 women, titles and positions held were: marketing manager at a large financial company, consultant at UN Women, iOS developer at a small tech firm, student in finance program at NYU, event manager in a small financial/tech start-up, software engineer at a large financial/tech firm, session facilitator at large private college, and a graduate of Dartmouth Medical School. 

 

It was great to get women in very diverse industries who all had very different perspectives. Interestingly enough, although they had differing viewpoints on women's opportunities in the STEM fields, they all had similar fundamental opinions as I dug deeper for answers. Some questions I asked were:
 

- Where do you work? Talk about your role in your workplace.

- What elements of your work environment do you find valuable?

- How are you set up for success at work/school?

- Tell me about the people you work with. Who do you feel comfortable working with?

- Describe the employees at your job with higher positions. Do you see yourself in a higher position/role?
- Do you have mentors? How did you meet your mentor? Is your mentor male or female?

- How impactful is/was your mentor for your career growth?

- How do you feel about opportunities in STEM fields for women? 

 

"It would be really nice to have more women to look up to in this field. I’m at the age where I'm thinking about settling down and starting a family and I can't really get advice from any of the men I work with who didn't have to think about these things." - Vicki, Software Engineer

"I had an internship at [Company Name] which was meant to provide a mentor for every female. It was basically one side of women of varying ages—some moms, and then 10 male developers at an average age of 24. It was a weird, uncomfortable dynamic." - Rosa, iOS Developer

 

Ada will help young women beginning their careers to easily discover potential role models and mentors in one place, and allow them to choose who to go to for guidance. Meeting these experienced professionals in accessible places provides value to young women, helping them expand their network and build meaningful relationships.

 

 

Being that having a mentor was something that most of my interviewees had in common, I decided to send out a quick survey to see that if having a mentor was indeed a valuable aspect of career growth. We wanted to find out how people were meeting their mentors (whether organically or not) and how they kept in touch with the mentors. This information would provide some sort of validity on whether or not we would forward with our focus on mentorships.

 

We workshopped the project with groups of 5 people (both men and women) to come up with features that would be critical in building a sense of community and which would be valuable to users. We asked ourselves what highly impactful features would be necessary to need to build a minimum viable product.

 

We used the feature prioritization chart and user stories to guide us through building user and task flows. What was the simplest way which involved the least amount of steps for a user to become a mentor, find a mentor, or find a workshop to attend? The "happy paths" demonstrate this.

"As a young woman studying finance, I want to attend workshops with experienced female professionals so that I can improve on my soft skills in the workplace.” 

"As a female engineer just beginning my career, I would like to find experienced professionals in the field who are women so I can get advice on what I can achieve with my skillset.” 
 

 

As we transitioned into the sketching phase, we reevaluated the existing user flows and asked ourselves these three questions:

 

1. How can we make this app more engaging?

2. What will make the user enjoy the sign-up process/steps taken to find mentors and actually interact with the community? 

 

Overall, the testers seemed much happier with the process for becoming a mentor because of the visual cues that show how many steps there were, directional language and copy that fit the tone of the product, and intuitiveness. However, our three main takeaways were:

 

1. Highlight useful features so that users are drawn to them and want to interact with them. 

    - Use design elements to prominently feature the Recent Activity feed since users often glanced over it   

    - Using design elements or wording/ language to show that the activities in the feed pertain to Caroline’s activity within the app (“Who is Emily?” “Are these activities from other apps that are integrated with this one?”)