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Serendis Leadership
UX, Design & Development of flagship digital product
Providing UX, design and development expertise, 4mation worked with Serendis Leadership to transform its core digital product MentorKey, into an easy-to-use, intuitive SaaS product. The improved user experience and new features we’ve developed enable Serendis clients to self-serve, meaning user growth is no longer constrained by the availability of the Serendis team.
The story
Serendis is an Australian leadership consultancy that empowers people at all levels of organisations to embrace leadership as a mindset. They tailor leadership development programs to address an organisation’s specific needs, working with clients ranging from 200+ staff to enterprise clients with thousands of employees.
Serendis needed a partner to create a seamless user experience for their core digital product, MentorKey. Through 4mation’s UX expertise, we have created a more intuitive experience for over 1000 mentors and mentees. We have helped them refine and customise the product so Serendis clients can use MentorKey autonomously. This includes allowing their clients to run their own programs in-house, manage mentoring, coaching and sponsorship programs at their own pace and keeping all of their information on their own dedicated portal.
“It was important that we partnered with an organisation who really cares about our goals, and challenges us with different perspectives. We also have high expectations about our partners’ internal culture, the way they support their people and manage risks and these requirements were absolutely met by 4mation.”
Maud Lindley Founder and Director
“Not only do 4mation have expert developers who know the best ways of doing things. But they also had great insights for UX and UI, helping us with the strategic direction of the product.”
Kezia Gunawan Head of Product
The challenge
MentorKey as Serendis’ primary digital product, was developed to enable powerful and impactful mentoring conversations. The product provides a personalised mentoring journey for each mentor and mentee, guiding them through coaching modules to prepare effectively for their upcoming mentoring sessions.
In the initial stages of developing MentorKey, Serendis heavily focused on creating great content and developing features to create an impactful mentoring platform. Whilst the user feedback was great, they realised there was still potential to provide even better platform usability. 4mation’s challenge was to bring fresh perspectives to feature development and simplify user journeys to create a compelling interface and experience.
A more intuitive user journey
Serendis got feedback from its users that the platform’s content was terrific, but they often were unsure as to what to do next or where to go. 4mation was tasked with revamping the look and feel of the application to create a seamless, more intuitive user experience.
Through our iterative process, we looked at each feature individually and how it worked in the context of the overall product. An example is where the preparation mentees and mentors were undertaking was not clearly linked with the agenda of their upcoming mentoring sessions, leaving the user disengaged with the session itself or not knowing which module to undertake next. By giving more latitude to the user to shape their upcoming session’s agenda with the choice of various modules, additional written points and reflections, we made the user journey more natural and we guided participants to all the features available to them on the platform. User tips were also added to maximise the value of the MentorKey platform.
The feature refinement process was critical in giving mentors and mentees the ability to access more relevant information and complete their goals more efficiently within their course. We also worked with Serendis to determine which features of the product they were manually guiding people through. Then, we simplified the interface so users could self-serve and the Serendis team could save time.
Enabling scalability
A major goal of the revamp was ensuring Serendis clients could become their own ‘admins’, configuring their mentoring courses. Serendis wanted to enable their HR partners to have more control and ownership over their programs through building an intuitive UX to self-manage their program and provide impactful mentoring, at scale.
Technologies
| Technology | How was the technology used? |
| Vue Js | VueJS enabled us to create a responsive, state-managed, fast and self-guided user interface for the Web Portal. |
| Laravel | Laravel was used to implement secure, maintainable and scalable API’s which are used in the front-end and in other integrated applications |
| AWS infrastructure | S3, Aurora MySQL, EC2 and other essential services were used to manage the assets, database, deployments, security, scaling and high availability. |
The result
With the launch of the revamped product, Serendis will be able to help more organisations improve their organisational culture and leadership. The digital platform will allow people to access professional development and personal coaching, democratising access to quality mentoring courses.
Additionally, working alongside our Product Managers and Project Managers has enhanced Serendis’ understanding of product development and the milestones required to achieve their goals. The multidisciplinary nature of the 4mation team has given Serendis access to development expertise as well as UX and strategic direction.
Serendis and 4mation have developed a long-term partnership, with a relationship built on transparency and a shared understanding of goals. Serendis have big dreams, and 4mation continues to work with Serendis to make those dreams a reality.
Learn more about how MentorKey can provide your team with an impactful mentoring experience by checking out the video below.
