Developing a design phase for a mentoring mobile app

Abstract

Mobile applications in mentoring, besides adding technological value to institutions, provides the opportunity to improve the conditions of the education services offered, streamline the teaching processes, generate community and increase interaction between participants. The project presented consists of developing the design phase of a mobile application called e-mentoring, that facilitates communication, matching and implementation of a mentoring process for university students. To this end, the specific steps to achieve the overall objective are: 1) to perform a diagnosis to identify the applications designed to communicate between mentors and mentees in universities, 2) to identify the requirements for the design of mobile applications and 3) to propose a design model for the application that provides information about the requirements for the design of the mobile application. In this context, the social, graphic design, heuristic evaluation, technological requirements and legal external factors that can influence the development of the mobile application are analyzed. The development of the design for this application is presented as a tool that serves as a meeting point, information and exchange of experiences between students and mentors, and at the same time strengthens and extends the links with the academic processes of their institutions. It also describes the process of model-based design development of the application in question. Considering that the functionalities defined for the mobile application are used through additional development, it is recommended that this is done on the student management system of the university where it is applied. The application resulting from this project is a prototype that will have to be debugged and tested in subsequent phases that are beyond the scope of this project.