Ten weeks.
A clearer question.

Three questions.
One increasingly focused direction.

The short project makes the whole loop visible. Research changed the question; a broad set of ideas made the scope problem visible; prototyping and evaluation helped the team narrow the direction.

1. 01

   A focus tool for incoming students

   Begin with a hypothesis about distraction, pressure, and adapting to college.

2. 02

   Balance academic and social responsibilities

   Recognize the range of student concerns, then encounter the temptation to address them all.

3. 03

   Make helpful dialogue possible

   Concentrate on connecting a student with a mentor who can offer guidance.

Study the transition before prescribing a tool.

The starting hypothesis connected incoming students’ difficulties to deadlines, digital distractions, and mental wellness. The team used two first-year student interviews, mentor interviews, an online survey, and in-person guerrilla storytelling to investigate what entering college felt like.

Explore broadly, then choose what matters.

The second design question asked how students could balance social and academic responsibilities in a healthy way. Ideas included a button for difficult moments, first-year wellness classes, and a social space for mental wellness. The first instinct was to combine them.

Make the connection concrete.

Connectie became a college-centered, peer-to-peer mentoring concept informed by a stepped-care model. The screens made the service tangible on both sides: choosing a mentor, explaining a need, sending a request, coordinating a meeting, staying in touch, starting a session, and exchanging feedback.

Use testing to keep the frame open.

The process overview records paper prototyping and usability testing, followed by a low-fidelity prototype, another usability test, more research, and a high-fidelity prototype. The presentation’s tactical synthesis says the combined concept tried to address too much at once.

Let the prototype reveal the next questions.

The final reflection returns to mentor onboarding, safety, repeat meetings, past chats, and testing both the request for help and the acceptance of a mentoring task. It also proposes investigating care and support models.

Decide which problem belongs in this project.

The design question changed three times: from helping incoming students focus, to balancing academic and social life, to enabling helpful dialogue. The team recognized that covering every student difficulty would make the concept too broad.

Compare the starting assumptions with the evidence.

The original hypotheses emphasized time pressure, distraction, and mental wellness. Research showed a wider mix of concerns and that many were not unique to first-year students.

Find the common thread across different problems.

The team’s synthesis identified mentors as a source of help across the situations they had encountered. Principles such as usefulness and simplicity helped turn that observation into a more coherent concept: a system that makes person-to-person connection possible.

Build the service handoffs, on both sides.

The final screens pair mentee and mentor experiences across the request, meeting coordination, between-session contact, session kickoff, and feedback. This makes the responsibilities and transitions visible enough to discuss and test.

Carry a smaller, clearer next step forward.

The closing slide proposes further testing, mentor onboarding and safety work, improved follow-up, and exploration of university pilot and ownership partners. These proposals show what the team believed would be needed beyond the classroom project.

Follow the connection from request to feedback.

The final screens show the proposed experience. The names, messages, and profiles belong to the original prototype; these are design artifacts, not records of a live mentoring service.

Request sent +

Coordinate a meeting +

Keep in touch between meetings +

Start a session +

Exchange feedback +

The useful result was a sharper problem and a testable connection.

The team produced a mentoring concept and prototype, together with a clearer account of the work that remained. The strongest lesson in this ten-week arc is that gathering more problems does not require building more features. Research can instead reveal the simpler relationship that connects them.

This account uses the team’s 24-page presentation and the ten-week duration recorded with the project. It does not claim launch, adoption, health outcomes, or measured usability gains. Individual task ownership beyond the team credit is not established in the deck.