A mentorship product needs to feel personal at first contact
X-Talent was a mentorship and coffee-chat product by XChange, connecting professionals with career mentees for one-on-one sessions, industry insight, and personal growth. I joined a four-person team as UI/UX Designer for a focused engagement on the design system and core flows.
Three pillars of the engagement: mentor discovery, reservation management, and session booking from a mentor profile — all built on the Figma design system.
Match quality and scheduling friction decide everything
Coffee-chat platforms live or die on match quality and scheduling friction. New users face high information asymmetry — they don't know who they don't know — and turning a lukewarm intent into a booked session without drop-off is the core design problem.
The product also needed a consistent visual language that a small team could extend without constant back-and-forth with design — so the design system itself was a deliverable, not a side project.
Build the system, then prove it on the critical paths
- Designed the product's first Figma design system — components, typography, tokens — so engineering could build new screens without waiting on every spec.
- Created user flows for mentor discovery, scheduling, and session management; built interactive prototypes for the critical paths.
- Collaborated closely with the Design Lead, PM, and Engineer through weekly reviews, shipping design iterations in sync with engineering sprints.
- Refined information architecture so mentor profiles, availability, and session history felt like one coherent surface.
What shipped
Handed off a complete Figma design system — components, typography, tokens — plus interactive prototypes for the three flows below. The prototypes were validated in stakeholder reviews and early user testing during the engagement.
- 1
- Figma design system — components, typography, tokens
- 3
- Core flows prototyped end-to-end
- 7mo
- Embedded with a four-person team
The team may have continued development after handoff; I stepped away at that point and don't track post-handoff outcomes.