FUSION is a Filipinx organization at UCI dedicated towards supporting students pursuing STEM related fields. As the Design Lead for the first cohort of FIP (FUSION ICS Project) leaders, I led a design sub-team in building a full-stack application that reflects FUSION’s five core pillars:

Our team identified a common struggle shared by many students—accessing mentorship and professional opportunities—and set out to design a solution. The job market for college students is highly competitive, with key challenges including limited internship and new grad opportunities, delayed responses or being ghosted by recruiters, and difficulty in aligning student skills with employer expectations.

To explore this idea of mentorship, we conducted user surveys, interviews, and constructed a competitive analysis to find out students’ struggles with finding internships and mentors.

Starting with low-fidelity wireframes, we prioritized usability and simplicity. As we entered mid-fidelity, we tested early iterations with users and made changes based on feedback, such as simplifying the scheduling system by moving it into the dashboard and consolidating pages to make the site easier to navigate.

We transitioned to high-fidelity prototypes using a warm, coffee-inspired branding style—inviting yet professional. We then conducted usability tests to see how our audience would respond to our application.

Our feedback included how our use of color was overwhelming and how the navbar was hard to understand due to the lack of labels. The profile card we designed was also not as intuitive as we thought, as users struggled with understanding how it worked and preferred default profile views. We took all of this into account and iterated to create our prototype of KapeChat! 

With our Coffee Chat section, users are able to view profile cards, view their whole profile, and request to message another user. A user’s contact information and resume on their profile is locked until both parties mutually message each other, to maintain security. This gives users the ability to find mentors who can match their needs and capability to contact them for potential coffee chats.

Once users mutually message, they can then schedule coffee events, which are essentially meetings initiated by the app. Users input the event name, recipient, location, date, time, and description. This invite is then sent to the recipient and shows on their dashboard, where they can accept it. Ultimately, this streamlines the idea of planning a day to hold a coffee chat without the need for back-and-forth messaging. 

We then wrapped up our designs and handed them off to the development team.