Designing a Collaborative Mentorship Platform for Software Residency

A user-centered app enabling mentors to efficiently guide and evaluate resident development.

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Clarity for mentors across resident tracking workflows

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Friction in evaluating and comparing mentee development

Context

Role:

Lead UX/UI Designer

Client:

ZEAL & LEARN Academy

Team:

PM, Design Director, Devs

The Software Residency program — created by ZEAL and Learn Academy — aimed to close the skill gap between junior and senior engineers through structured mentorship. The mentorship experience relied on informal workflows and disconnected tools, making it difficult for mentors to track resident development and provide consistent, valuable feedback.

This case study focuses on one strategic aspect of that effort: designing a mentor-centric platform that supports clear tracking, efficient feedback, and collaborative oversight.

Challenge

Mentors needed a tool that would let them:

View all mentees in one place
Track weekly progress and quarterly evaluations
Collaborate with other mentors on resident development

However, the existing environment lacked a unified structure. Mentors and administrative roles relied on inconsistent processes, multiple disconnected tools, and ad hoc documentation, which limited their ability to provide structured feedback, continuity, and growth visibility across residency cycles.

Before

No single source of truth: Mentors used separate tools and notes to track resident progress.

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Collaboration friction: Mentor feedback was not centralized or easy to reference in team conversations.

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Unclear workflows: There was no established UI or UX pattern guiding mentor actions from updates to evaluations.

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

Inconsistent tracking
‍Progress was logged differently by each mentor

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No clear roles or ownership
Responsibilities for updates, reviews, and follow-ups were undefined

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Limited shared visibility
Mentors couldn’t easily see each other’s feedback or resident progress



Difficult to track growth
Weekly and quarterly insights were scattered and hard to compare

Goal

Design a mentor-centric app that:

Provides a central overview of all mentees and their progress
Enables efficient tracking of weekly and quarterly assessments
Supports collaborative feedback between mentors
Is informed by real mentor needs through research and testing



Discovery



Information Architecture



Visual Design



Development

Solution

I focused on designing a mentor-centric workflow that replaces fragmented tools with a single, structured experience for tracking progress and giving feedback.

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The solution centered on three core ideas:

Centralization: Bringing mentee progress, weekly updates, and evaluations into one clear overview
Structure: Turning informal mentorship practices into repeatable, easy-to-use flows
Collaboration: Making mentor feedback visible and comparable across the team

‍

Rather than adding features, I prioritized clarity of workflow ensuring mentors always knew:

who they were reviewing,
what needed attention,
and how to move from observation to evaluation.

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Research insights guided early prototypes, and usability testing helped refine navigation, terminology, and feedback loops to better match real mentor behavior.

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The result is a focused, easy-to-scan interface that supports mentorship at scale without adding process overhead.