Bita Bostanchi - Department of Industrial Design, Faculty of Art and Architecture, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Mentoring plays a fundamental role in the education and career life of people. The advent of technology has changed the nature of mentoring and leads to creating of a new approach in education that is called Electronic Mentoring (e-mentoring). The presented project involves developing a mobile application design phase that enables mentees to communicate, match, and carry out a mentoring process. The design thinking approach was employed to uncover stakeholders’ needs and pain points; the survey and individual interviews were used to gather information about end users' requirements and expectations for the app. Through the implementation of the design thinking approach, this study chose and prototyped amobile app-aided mentoring platform that aimed to ease the mentoring process for the end users, and improves user experience and usability simultaneously. Generally, the results yielded from the usability test and User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) were positive and satisfying. Feedback from users illustrated that the platform has the potential to improve key aspects of the user experience, such as pragmatic and hedonic qualities. Regarding the UEQ scales, the values of all ۶ user experience aspects, are more than ۰.۸ which represents a positive evaluation. Also, the values from the benchmark data set show that the app has placed above average when it comes to Attractiveness, Perspicuity, Efficiency, and Novelty. It is, thus, hoped that the findings of this paper will be taken into account by policymakers and stakeholders, in the foreseeable future.

E-mentoring, Design Thinking, Mobile app-aided platform, Online mentoring