As a first-generation student managing family responsibilities alongside my studies, I found myself constantly juggling multiple healthcare portals, paper documents, calendar apps, and sticky notes. Critical appointment details would slip through the cracks. Medical history lived in different systems. Important dates were forgotten. I wasn't alone. After speaking with 5-6 peers facing similar challenges, a clear pattern emerged: existing tools were either bloated with unnecessary features or required creating separate accounts for each family member—adding complexity instead of reducing it.

I set out to design a unified experience where conversations, responsibilities, and appointments could live together. The goal was to make the system feel as flexible as a workspace, as trustworthy as a health portal, and as immediate as messaging. Instead of forcing families to adopt a rigid process, the product needed to adapt to their existing habits and gradually introduce structure.

We designed Mente to address the specific needs of DPI's community — a purpose-built platform that puts mentees in control of discovering the right mentors through intuitive browsing and filtering, streamlines the connection process with clear request flows, and keeps all communication centralized in one place. By designing specifically for DPI's program structure rather than adopting a generic tool, we created an experience that feels personal, efficient, and aligned with how mentorship actually works in their ecosystem.

Designing Relyo reinforced the importance of simplifying workflows rather than adding more features. Small interaction improvements had a bigger impact than larger feature additions.Early concepts assumed structured user behavior, but feedback showed that people navigate tools in flexible, non-linear ways, which influenced how I approached the layout and interactions.I learned to focus more on system clarity and information hierarchy, ensuring users could quickly understand what to do next.If continuing the project, I would incorporate earlier usability validation and more realistic scenario testing to refine decisions sooner.