Magnify
How to Create a Seamless Support Structure of Caring Adults for Every Child
1/7: Background
Every year, hundreds of children are left on the waitlists of formal mentoring programs. In most cases, these are the children who need support the most.
The Mentoring Partnership of Southwestern Pennsylvania came to our team with a goal: design a tool that could help extend their everyday mentoring framework to more children. They didn't come with a solution — they came with a problem. Our job was to discover what that tool should be.
After a rigorous period of discovery and research, and followed up with design and testing, our team proposed Magnify to support “everyday mentors”
Our team of five HCI graduate students at Carnegie Mellon spent eight months researching, prototyping, and testing — working directly with TMP stakeholders and supported by weekly advisor consultations throughout.
2/7: Research That Enaged, Not Just Asked.
From the start, the team wanted research methods that would actively engage participants rather than just extract answers. We used contextual inquiry, and incorporated Luma Institute methods of design thinking. We used storyboards to solicit responses to early concepts before anything was built.
The full research phase drew on literature review, stakeholder mapping, interviews, observation, and persona development. All synthesis happened collaboratively. The methods shaped the quality of what we found.
Our goal: Understanding mentoring landscape as a whole and not just formal mentoring. We pulled all the information into an affinity diagram of the mentoring landscape..
3/7: The Reframe - The Problem Wasn’t A Shortage of Mentors
The research surfaced a finding that changed the direction entirely.
Adults with regular contact with youth already existed in abundance — teachers, coaches, community members. The obstacle wasn't a shortage of willing mentors. It was that these adults didn't see themselves as mentors and weren't equipped to act like one.
The opportunity wasn't recruiting new people into formal mentoring programs. It was activating the bonds that already existed.
The reframe — from recruiting formal mentors to activating adults already in regular contact with youth — defined every design decision that followed. Instead of asking adults to seek out youth to mentor, the team designed for the moments of contact they already had.
4/7: Why Bad Mentoring Is Worse Than No Mentoring
Research also revealed something that constrained the design in an important way.
Adults were often intimidated by the word "mentoring." And poorly executed mentoring — without grounding in best practices — could do more harm than no mentoring at all.
How might we help adults with already established relationships with kids to become confident in their ability to be mentors
Privacy and legal concerns around designing for interactions with youth came up early. The team's view was that because the app targeted adults already in regular contact with children in professional contexts, the risk was manageable for an MVP, pending refinement of specific activities by TMP's own experts.
The design had to incorporate evidence-based practices without making them feel like a burden — building confidence without creating pressure.
5/7: The App - Modular, Motivating, Connected
Four principles drove the final product design:
1-Focused on doing over reading
Lessons were built around action — turning naturally occurring interactions with youth into mentoring moments — rather than passive content consumption. The principle was grounded in a research finding: adults needed to build habits through practice, not instruction.
2-Manageable load.
Lessons were broken into bite-size pieces, with gradual progression toward more demanding interactions. Adults could build mentoring habits without feeling overwhelmed.
3-Progress and community visibility.
Users could see their own progress and draw encouragement from their community — addressing the insight that mentors often don't see the impact of what they do, even when it's meaningful.
4-Feedback Loop
A TMP dashboard closed the feedback loop — collecting input from everyday mentors in the field and providing data to support TMP's fundraising efforts.
The app was designed to be modular, supporting growth over time as new lesson types and mentor communities were added
6/7: 11 Prototypes, 49 Participants, Iterating Through Sprint Methodology
For the prototyping phase, I was an early advocate for adopting Google Ventures' Sprint methodology which is a structured approach to rapid iteration. The team aligned quickly. It gave every round of testing a clear question to answer and kept the work from drifting.
Eleven prototypes. Forty-nine participants. Five rounds of testing at summer camps and schools — experience mapping, lightning demos, crazy eights, concept video, and user testing.
Early rounds focused on concept validation. A key finding emerged: participants wanted more autonomy in scheduling their training. The app structure was adjusted accordingly. Later rounds combined usability testing with concept validation, sharpening both the interaction design and the framing of the product's value.
Each testing round was built to answer one specific open question from the round before, and the prototypes were built address the core questions.
7/7: Outcome
All assets and a detailed roadmap were handed off to TMP at the end of the engagement.
Months later, TMP featured the Magnify app at a fundraiser for everyday mentoring — the concept had taken hold. A member of our team later joined TMP to help build it. The app itself wasn't ultimately funded and built.
