Expresso
Contribution
Founding Product Designer
Graphic Design
Design System
Website
Timeline
Jan 2025 - Present
Metrics
Users Created
+
Booked Chats
+
Here at Expresso, we're a platform that empower our students at UC Davis to find their mentors and branch out their professional career growth. With countless underclassmen who has no guidance in their career-path, our job is to make it accessible for all students.
Why is it important to me?
As a transfer student and spending my first year and half, I didn't have any helping hands to supercharge my professional career. When I first joined this team, I wanted to help conceptualize and design a new product that'll help UC Davis Students find their mentor and create meaningful connections
At UC Davis, many students feel intimidated to approach upperclassmen for career advice, leading to missed opportunities for mentorship and professional growth.
How might we personalize mentor profiles to highlight their personalities, interests, and experiences, making them more relatable and engaging for students to connect with?
No Research, Just test it
My Product Manager and I wanted to unveil our product within 2 weeks with 0 user-research to see if this product was suitable here at UC Davis. We were willing to see if Expresso would be a successful or failed product since there was no market @ UC Davis.
The results with our MVP
After our first month of beta testing. We had over 100+ users onboarding on our platform, with 1.2K unique visitors viewing our page, 30 coffee chats booked. However, we noticed that our conversation rate was at 34% of students onboarding through and not many of them booking coffee chats.
Viewers
2.5K
User Accquisitons
300+
Onboarding rate
90%
Bad Actors
There's many bad actors out there, especially the ones who want to start drama. During a time of release, we've had an increase of "bad actors" on our platform, making false invitation to our mentors, which add a security breach. We then decided to switch over Cal.com since it added more security and we can oversee who's booking coffee chats.
Interviewing Users and Students
With our first beta launch, my PM and I started to conduct user-interviews with our current users and non-users. All of my interviewers were highly emphasizing on the mentor's personality and career achievements. While the other current users didn't book a coffee chat with a stranger.
A new chapter to Expresso
After countless hours of interviewing with strangers and users on expresso. We decided to revamp the entire UI/UX and onboarding flow to make it feel like a fun task instead of an assignment to create an account with us.
Redesigned the entire structure from the inside-out, created a more meaningful landing page to perseude new users to onboard
Make it fun, not an assignment.
After countless hours of A/B testing through Maze, our team decided to focus on minimizing for both parties
We've removed Calendly.com and replaced Cal.com to more security to our mentors while improving the overall UX flow. Before with Calendly.com, mentors were enforced to create an account and embed their expresso account. Now with Cal.com, we can seamless implement into one core flow to make it seamless.
Viewers
1.2K
User Accquisitons
100+
Onboarding rate
34%
Mentor's POV
Mentee's POV
No experiences, just goals in life.
We've noticed that many students were only booking coffee chats with mentors with robust backgrounds; FAANG companies only, which breaks the whole integrity of expresso. My PM and I decided to remove job experiences, but instead list out hobbies and
Final Feedback from the Community
We've received numerous feedback about our product how it empowers underclassmen here at UC Davis to seek out career advice and gain some mentorship, many of them enjoyed booking and gaining knowledge from the upperclassman
Message from the team
We're college students in a small club on campus, we're so busy with our assignments that we've hadn't pushed out the final product to the public, but we're so close! Our product will be released in Fall 2025, when the new students arrive!
What I've learned
Working in a such paced environment taught me how to work collaboratively with a cross functional team. Also, never make last minute designs when you ship. It's a bad habit.
Thanks to {NAME}, I've learned a lot!
Expresso changed my life
Do I have to pay a service?
I've learned how to create a start up!
Wait, it's free?