CovEd
CovEd is a non-profit dedicated to connecting K-12 students with a college mentor. Created during the Covid pandemic, CovEd allows one-on-one mentoring, lifelong community, and events beyond the classroom such as Speaker Events
Overview
The current CovEd Website has usability issues making it difficult for parents and mentees to find specific resources. I designed new features allowing for a more accessible experience.
Client: CovEd
Status: Completed
Role: Design Researcher, UX Design

The Challenge
-
CovEd needs help showcasing relevant information to students and mentors in order to more easily match them together while also creating a more user friendly way to connect students with one another in outside programming and platforms.
-
The website is used to connect k-12 students with a volunteer college mentor for tutoring help 45 minutes each week during the Covid Pandemic and has since expanded allowing for students to connect with one another
-
Inclusion can be improved with the current drop down menu items allowing students with ESL or other needs to be addressed between mentees and mentors with ease.
The Outcome
-
I proposed replacing the current search criteria mentees can choose from and including only keywords initially; a blurb is available after the mentee clicks on the mentor. The website redesign was done in an effort to best connect mentors and mentees with one another while also making other programming more readily available and easy to find.
-
I re-designed specific areas of the website to support the CovEd’s goals by providing a comprehensive experience as a response to the most common user needs and wants.
Focus groups were conducted and with 20+ people and fell into one of the following three categories
​
Mentors- College students matched with k-12 students through the website
​
Guardians- Adult family members who help set an account for their child to match with a mentor
​
CovEd Management - Someone who currently helps manage CovEd from social media, web development, etc
Research
Based on our user feedback, we found that the features that parents wanted most from CovEd were the ability to request mentors based on their ability to mentor using a language other than English and other special assistance that their child may need. The current navigation makes it difficult to understand whether the mentor teaches Spanish as a class or if they are able to speak in that language during their session and a subsection of their bio is shown below their name making it difficult to parse for keywords. I proposed adding a specific section during sign up to add additional needs and showcasing only pertinent information underneath the mentors name with their full bio showcased once clicked on.
Iterated
Design
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
Final Design
Based on user feedback from mentors and current CovEd staff, a need to showcase the strong public presence of CovEd along with an ability to access additional resources through other platforms CovEd uses was needed. CovEd has been featured in prominent news outlets and also have many outside resources and activities that are showcased on other platforms CovEd uses. With this feedback, I included additional features such as a Press and Testimonial Page. I also created a more concise contact us page with cohesive branding colors, adding a bio section for the CovEd team, and adding social media to the footer and links to outside pages CovEd is involved with.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)