WMWE Website

Founded at the University of Texas at Dallas in the summer of 2016, Women Mentoring Women in Engineering is a mentoring program that fosters mentorships between students of UTD and working women. Students are paired up with professional women currently working in the technology industry or in academia to be mentored for a semester and build a relationship with those familiar with the working environment.

In an effort to improve their online presence and keep up with exponential growth, Women Mentoring Women in Engineering recently underwent a rebranding effort that included updating their social media accounts and valuable documents. However, their website was left behind, with an outdated design and incomplete information. As the organization continued to grow, it became clear that the website needed a complete overhaul to provide visitors with all of the necessary information, including sponsorship details, mission statements, and contact information.

PROBLEM

How can we revamp the Women Mentoring Women in Engineering website to accommodate their growth, enhance their online presence, and provide visitors with comprehensive information and a better user experience?

USER RESEARCH

After sitting down with my development team, we fully expected to be able to complete this project in a matter of weeks. Once we finally got to clicking through the current website, though, we realized we had quite a lot in store for us. Without consistent maintenance of the site's content, the website was filled with old information and broken links, and finding a place to start was just about as difficult as finding a single page that was up to date. So, to start, we decided to pull from our experiences as officers and mentees within the program. Then, we conducted a series of interviews with officers, mentees, and mentors to get a better understanding of our updated priorities, and identified 3 target areas of improvement.

Our old website, featuring too much whitespace and an officer board long graduated :(

🎯 HOW MIGHT WE INCREASE ENGAGEMENT WITH A SINGULAR PLATFORM?

Being a marketing officer for a rapidly growing organization is no easy feat. As each new semester rolls around, it brings with it a fresh batch of mentees, mentors, and events that require weekly promotion. Juggling so many moving parts can make it all too easy to forget important tasks, like posting flyers on LinkedIn or keeping in touch with potential new members through Instagram DMs. Unfortunately, this problem doesn't just affect our officer board — it also has negative consequences for our mentees. Many interested new members and current members have been driven away by the sheer difficulty of trying to keep up with content spread across multiple platforms.

A peek into what "normal" engagement looks like for a student organization...

🎯 HOW MIGHT WE PERSONALIZE THE MENTORSHIP EXPERIENCE?

With WMWE's rapid growth, keeping track of the old and the new is something that our old website did not do well. As a very niche organization, we strived to create personal connections with mentors and mentees alike, but with no way to easily access a list of current members, it was difficult to keep track of who was who. For our mentors, we had to rely on Linkedin profiles and their short application responses, while for our mentees, we had almost nothing to go off of apart from their names and majors. Without any of this information, the disconnect throughout WMWE became prominent and it turned out to be hard — for not only us, but mentors and mentees — to pick up a conversation with someone who they had no knowledge of. Many mentors were even remote, so being able to connect with them on a personal level was even more difficult when we could hardly find their contact information.

🎯 HOW MIGHT WE FACILITATE FASTER COMMUNICATION ACROSS WMWE?

With WMWE being so involved in the industry and in the student body, we have a strong heirarchy that helps us organize different aspects of the program, including outreach, marketing, events, and program coordination. However, with so many different people involved in the organization and various individual spreadsheets keeping track of endless information, there is no single place where we can communicate to students. What's worse? Our mentees themselves didn't know how to reach us directly, and instead communicated through an assigned Mentoring Team Manager, who then had to grab a coordinator's attention, and only then would we as an executive team be able to respond. Many of us officers went unnoticed as a result, and though it kept our team structured, it also meant conflict resolution and necessary communication took longer than expected.

The WMWE pyramid, presented to mentees at orientation. Looks simple, but with 130+ members, it gets a lot harder...

IDEATION

Rather than jumping straight into the design process, we decided to take a step back and understand how we could best ensure each problem got an equal amount of attention on the website. We started by creating a flowchart and hashing out the information architecture.

HI-FIDELITY WIREFRAMING

Once we fully understood the information architecture and defined our branding, we started to create a set of wireframes for our website. We originally tried to stick to our social media's branding, which was more playful, and tried to embrace vibrant colors. However, the designs we created, from a developer's standpoint, was not at all responsive or adaptable for future changes.

We switched gears to a more minimalistic design, which was much more flexible and allowed us to focus on the content instead of the design, which had been another one of our major priorities in the earlier stages of the project.

CORE FEATURES

PERSONAL TAKEAWAYS

As the project is still ongoing, we have not yet fully observed the impact of the website on our organization. However, technically speaking, the WMWE website offered me a chance to gain hands-on experience with Figma, React, Node.js, and Firebase, and to see how version control tools like Github operate in a professional setting.

Of course, being a freshman when this project started meant I came across challenges that my teammates had overcome their own freshman year. I learned how to work with a team of people who have unique skillsets and gained a better understanding of how to communicate effectively, especially with the technical obstacles we faced.

As this project comes to a close, I am excited to see how the website will impact our organization's internal and external structure, and I am grateful that a project like this allowed me to engage more with the amazing community at WMWE and soon, will allow so many others to do the same.