Redesigning mentor onboarding to reduce drop-off and help volunteers feel confident before their first session.
Working with an LGBTQIA+ youth mentoring initiative, we explored ways to improve the mentor experience through research and UX design. Our goal was to foster deeper connections and make the platform more inclusive, accessible, and engaging.
Overview
StartOut Australia is a health promotion charity supporting the mental wellbeing of young people of diverse sex, sexuality, or gender (DSG). Their online mentoring platform connects DSG youth with trained volunteer mentors — providing a safe, anonymous space for guidance, connection, and support regardless of where someone lives.
The platform had a meaningful purpose. The mentor experience, however, wasn't keeping up with it.
The Challenge
Mentors were showing up trained and motivated — and then being left to figure things out on their own. There was no structured guidance for conversations, no way to track how a mentee was progressing, and in some cases, a gap of up to a year between completing training and receiving their first mentee.
By the time a mentee did reach out, many mentors felt underprepared. Some mentoring relationships stalled before they really started.
The brief: redesign the mentor experience to reduce friction, build mentor confidence, and support more meaningful conversations with DSG youth.
Research
Because mentees are anonymous on the platform, I wasn't able to interview them directly — an important constraint that shaped the entire project. All user research was conducted with mentors via Zoom interviews.
What we heard:
Mentors felt underprepared after training. The initial onboarding was helpful, but there was no ongoing support once they were matched with a mentee. Many described feeling unsure how to start conversations, especially with mentees who were hesitant to open up.
The wait between training and first contact was long. Some mentors waited 3 months to a year before being matched. By that point, the confidence built during training had faded.
There was no notification system. If a mentee reached out, mentors weren't always alerted promptly — meaning some early connection moments were simply missed.
Conversations lacked structure. Mentors weren't looking for a script, but they wanted a starting point. Without any prompts or tools, interactions could feel flat — especially early on.
I mapped a mentor journey to visualise where these friction points clustered. Unsurprisingly, most of them sat right at the start of the relationship — exactly when first impressions matter most.
Design
Session Prep Toolkit: A resource hub accessible before and during sessions — conversation starters, topic guides, and training refreshers. The goal was to give mentors a safety net without making the experience feel scripted. Usability testing confirmed this was the feature mentors valued most.
Mentee Progress Tracker: A simple visual tool for tracking milestones and growth over time. Initial designs were too metric-heavy, which felt clinical for a platform built on emotional support. I simplified it to focus on qualitative milestones — moments of connection, topics explored, mood over time — rather than numbers.
Reflective Journal: A built-in note-taking space for mentors to log session highlights and revisit key moments. Particularly useful for mentors managing multiple mentees, and for maintaining continuity between sessions.
In-session Conversation Prompt: Guided questions and mood check-ins that mentors could pull up mid-conversation without disrupting the flow. These were added after an early round of testing revealed mentors wanted in-session support, not just pre-session prep.
Safe Exit for Mentees: A clearly labelled "end chat" button giving mentees an easy way to exit conversations at any time. A small addition — but an important one for a platform where psychological safety is non-negotiable.
Outcome
The redesigned mentor experience gave volunteers the tools and confidence to show up more effectively for the young people they were supporting.
60% improvement in onboarding task completion — measured through usability testing on the prototype, comparing task completion rates before and after the redesign.
Post-testing feedback from mentors indicated greater confidence going into first sessions, easier initiation of conversations with hesitant mentees, and a stronger sense of continuity across sessions.
Reflection
This was one of the more ethically complex projects I've worked on — designing for a vulnerable community while being unable to include them in research directly. It pushed me to think carefully about how to design responsibly under constraint, and to be honest about the limits of what we could validate.
The mentor experience improved meaningfully. But the gap that remained clear at the end was mentee voice. Any future iteration of this work needs to find a way to incorporate mentee perspectives — even indirectly, through careful methods that protect their anonymity.
