Somali professionals remain underrepresented in the tech industry and often lack access to mentorship, support, and culturally relevant resources. Caawi set out to bridge this gap — but designing for a global, multilingual audience required a thoughtful, accessible and trust-driven experience.

Key challenges included:

• Designing clear, supportive experiences for both mentors and mentees
• Building for accessibility across language, location, and tech familiarity
• Creating trust and clarity from the first interaction
• Navigating a shift in direction after a competing mentoring platform launched during development

As one of three UX designers on the project, I led research while also contributing significantly to UX strategy, user journeys, content design, and wireframes. Our team worked in an agile, collaborative format, regularly sharing work, co-facilitating ideation, and aligning with development.

Key contributions:

• Led user research: created interview guides, conducted interviews, analysed data
• Presented insights to inform product direction and scope
• Co-created personas, journey maps, and IA
• Designed the mentor-side experience from onboarding to matching
• Collaborated with devs to ensure feasibility and scale for multilingual delivery

1. Research & Discovery

I began by analysing registration forms submitted by new members to identify key expectations and pain points. From this, I created interview guides and conducted 1:1 interviews across different geographies and career stages — surfacing critical themes like confidence gaps, limited access, and isolation in tech.

Mid-project, I noticed that users from Somalia and Kenya were underrepresented. I independently organised a second round of interviews with this audience, uncovering unique challenges including:

• Language barriers that limited access to tech education
• Mentorship needs not addressed by global platforms
• A desire for relatable, region-specific networking

Key findings from our initial research — highlighting pain points around mentorship access, confidence, and community

2. Reframing Scope & Strategy

During development, a similar mentoring platform was launched by a peer community. Our team paused to re-evaluate direction. I presented findings from the second research round, which showed that these platforms weren’t addressing the needs of multilingual, regionally diverse users.

This helped the team align around continuing the project, with new priorities:

• Filter mentors by language, region, and career stage
• Build clear, role-specific onboarding
• Focus on trust, community, and cultural relatability

3. Personas, Journey Mapping & IA

Using our interview data, we created personas for both mentors and mentees and hosted a journey mapping workshop with the wider team. This helped define key friction points, emotional states, and missed opportunities across the user journey.

We used these artefacts to co-create the IA and key user flows — linking them directly to platform requirements, scope planning, and team tasks.

Mentor persona created from interview insights — used throughout the design process to inform decisions.

User journey mapping revealed key friction points and emotional moments in the mentor/mentee experience.

4. Wireframing & Design

As a team, we each took ownership of a key user flow. I led the design for the mentor experience — including onboarding, matching, and profile setup. We focused on:

• Reducing cognitive load
• Making responsibilities and expectations clear
• Creating an interface that could scale with future programs and languages

Our design system was modular to support bilingual layouts and mobile-first access.

Mid-fidelity wireframes for the mentor flow — designed to balance clarity, flexibility, and future scalability.

The Caawi MVP delivers a lightweight, multilingual mentoring platform that connects mentors and mentees based on their region, interests, and career stage. Designed for clarity, trust, and community alignment, the platform now supports Somali professionals globally in accessing mentorship tailored to their context.

• Research directly shaped product scope, prioritisation, and MVP features
• Helped team pivot from competitor pressure to a more community-specific value proposition
• Designed a responsive, scalable mentor experience with modular content
• Created artefacts (personas, journey maps, IA) that guided design, development, and program planning
• Platform is now live and expanding its reach

• How to lead research and apply it across strategy, structure, and interaction design
• The importance of designing not just for usability, but for confidence and trust
• That localisation requires more than translation — it needs structural empathy
• That design for education and community empowerment must be flexible, contextual, and inclusive