Bukable Web Application
The Bukable web application was designed to bridge the gap between academic learning and real-world experience by making internships and mentorships easily accessible to undergraduates. Through a user-friendly interface, students can explore opportunities tailored to their interests, skills, and location. The platform features personalized search, application tracking, and feedback tools. Built using an agile process, the project involved user research, iterative design, and full-stack development. Emphasis was placed on accessibility, scalability, and user experience. The launch was supported by strategic outreach across campuses, aiming to empower students with practical experiences that shape their careers.
The Claim
Access to internship and mentorship opportunities is a major challenge for undergraduate students, limiting their exposure to real-world experiences and hindering their professional development. Traditional methods of finding such opportunities, such as networking or searching job boards, can be time-consuming and often require prior work experience, leaving many students struggling to find meaningful opportunities. This gap in accessibility of internships and mentorships can result in missed opportunities for undergraduates to gain practical skills and knowledge that can positively impact their future careers.
The Problem
There is a need for a platform that can provide easy access to internship and mentorship opportunities for undergraduate students, with a particular focus on students who may not have established networks or prior experience. Such a platform should provide a user-friendly interface that helps students to find internships and mentors based on their interests and skills, as well as provide relevant information such as application deadlines, required qualifications, and feedback from past interns or mentees. By addressing this problem, such a platform can help to bridge the gap between undergraduate students and practical experience, improving their future job prospects and contributing to their personal growth and development.
My Role & Timeline
My Role
- UI Designer
- Brand Designer
Team
- 11 UX Designers
- 5 UX Researchers
- 1 Product / Project Manager
Timeline
- Overall: 4 months
- Discovery & Research: 2 months
- Brand and Design System: 1 month
- Design & testing: 1 month
Tools
- Figma
- Figjam
- Wrike
Target Users
The targeted users for the platform would be undergraduate students who are seeking to gain practical experience through internships and mentorships. This would include students from various fields of study and universities who are looking for opportunities to apply their academic knowledge in real-world settings, build their professional networks, and gain new skills and also, mentors and senior career experts who want to share their wealth of knowledge and provide guidance to mentees.
The platform would cater to students who may not have established networks or prior work experience and are looking for a convenient and user-friendly platform to browse, apply for, and track their internship and mentorship applications. Additionally, the platform may also cater to organizations and businesses that are offering internship or mentorship opportunities and looking to connect with potential candidates.
User Survey
The survey aimed to understand users’ needs, challenges in finding internships and mentorships, and expectations from the Bukable platform. It combined open- and closed-ended questions covering demographics, current search methods, preferred opportunity types, desired features, and pricing expectations.
Conducted online and distributed to undergraduates across various universities and fields, the survey helped validate assumptions, identify market gaps, and guide design and marketing strategies—ensuring Bukable delivers real value to its users.
Empathy Map
The empathy map provided a comprehensive view of the user’s world, including their motivations, pain points, and aspirations, and helped to identify opportunities for creating a solution that addresses their needs. It captured the insights and observations gathered and served as a guide for developing a user-centered solution that can provide value to the user.
By using an empathy map, the team was able to empathize with the users, understand their perspective, and create a solution that meets their needs and expectations.
Competitor Analysis
To ensure the proposed platform’s success, a competitive analysis was be conducted to identify the strengths and weaknesses of existing solutions in the market. The analysis considered similar platforms, job boards, and career services that offer internships and mentorships to undergraduate students. The analysis focused on factors such as user experience, features, pricing, availability of opportunities, and customer support. Through this analysis, we aim to identify areas where Bukable can differentiate itself, provide unique value to users, and address the pain points that students face in accessing internship and mentorship opportunities. The competitive analysis helped the team to make informed decisions about the design, features, and marketing strategy of the platform and ensure that it stands out in the market.
Below are names of competitors:
ADP list
Nova
Vektor
Good Wall
User Personas
User personas help the project team to focus on the user’s needs, goals, and challenges, rather than just the technical aspects of the platform. This approach ensures that the platform will be more intuitive and user-friendly, which will ultimately lead to better user engagement and adoption.
User Journey Map
This illustrates the user flow through the platform, starting with initial contact or discovery and continuing through the process of engagement into long term loyalty and advocacy.
User Flow
In other to have an understanding of how seamless and short it is for a user to quickly complete a task on the Bukable application, a user flow was drawn out showing the actions a user must take to achieve an end goal.
While Bukable isn’t limited to mentorship, below is a flow showing how a user seeking for mentorship on the Bukable platform can go about it, step b y step
Affinity Mapping
In a bid to extract useful insights from data obtained from the research exercise, Affinity Mapping was adopted to find patterns and sort them into themes. From this, we were able obtain insights needed to validate the project’s claims and improve our designs.
Wireframes
Using Figma, I translated my paper sketches into low-fidelity wireframes. Then, I improved them by adding a few relevant stock images and copies. At this stage, the wireframes were defined enough for some user testing. Based on these tests, I’ve made a few alternations and moved on to creating high-fidelity prototypes.
UI Design
Once the usability issues were resolved, I moved on to design the final screens in Figma. My goal was to create a visual identity that’s aligned with the brand’s values and message. Also, I’ve checked the competition and taken a deep dive into my catalog of references for inspiration.
