Thousands of The Church of Jesus Christ's missionaries begin their journey at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) each year, diving into intensive language training and spiritual preparation. While the MTC excels at preparing missionaries for their service, we noticed a key challenge: its digital tools were scattered across multiple platforms, creating unnecessary friction during an already demanding experience.
myMTC entered the scene as a mobile app that transformed how missionaries navigated their MTC experience. I aimed to bring everything they needed – from daily schedules to study materials – into one intuitive platform. By removing the friction from their preparation journey, missionaries could finally focus on what really mattered: their personal growth and mission readiness.
My Role
I started as a frontend developer, creating proof-of-concept implementations to validate new technologies the MTC wanted to explore. When the prototype proved successful, I transitioned into the UX engineer role, owning both the design direction and core component architecture.
The Problem
I joined a lean team of four - collaborating with our product manager, project lead, and lead developer to reimagine the MTC's digital experience. After talking with missionaries and staff, we uncovered a critical challenge: not only were missionaries juggling multiple platforms, but our existing tools weren't aligned with the Church's design system.
This was more than just a visual consistency problem. The Church had invested heavily in building a comprehensive design language that ensured accessibility and maintained its brand standards. Working closely with the lead developer, I saw this as an opportunity to build something that wouldn't just solve the immediate problem of fragmented tools but also set a foundation for future MTC applications.
The User
These are the key personas that shaped my approach to building myMTC. Each one brought unique challenges that pushed me to think differently about how the app should work.
Junior Missionary · 18-25 yrs
Fresh out of high school, he represents that tech-savvy generation that's grown up with smartphones almost glued to their hands. His phone isn't just a device—it's how he manages his life. While he's pumped about serving a mission, there are definitely some butterflies about leaving home for the first time. Looking at his prep checklist sometimes makes his head spin, and he often finds himself jumping between different apps, trying to keep track of everything he needs to do before heading out.
Senior Missionary · 60+ yrs
After wrapping up a fulfilling career in education, she's embracing a new chapter of service. While she's comfortable with basic technology, complex digital interfaces often leave her feeling frustrated and left behind. She profoundly values face-to-face interactions and sometimes finds the increasingly digital nature of Missionary work challenging. Her biggest concern is not the service but keeping pace with her younger counterparts in this technology-driven environment.
Leader · 40+ yrs
He's been training missionaries for years and has seen firsthand where they typically stumble. His days are packed with tracking multiple groups, and he's learned that staying on top of schedules and progress reports can make or break a missionary's training experience. The current system has him constantly switching between platforms, eating up the time he'd rather spend actually mentoring his missionaries. He wants to cut through the digital clutter and get back to what he does best - guiding these young missionaries through one of the most important transitions of their lives.
Key objectives
We settled on the following objectives after talking with leadership, staff members, and missionaries:
- Build a unified mobile app to replace the scattered digital tools missionaries juggle daily
- Create an intuitive interface that would work just as well for tech-savvy teens as it did for senior missionaries.
- Develop a scalable component system that could power future MTC applications.
- Align the product with the Church's design standards and accessibility requirements.
- Streamline administrative workflows so leaders can spend less time managing tools and more time mentoring.
Low Fidelity
After defining the key objectives, understanding our core users, and consulting with key stakeholders, I began ideating with low fidelity to visualize the overall layout of the design.
Layering and Leveraging a Design System
As stated before, we needed to use the Church's design system, Unity. Still, there was a problem: Our app would be hybrid, using React for the UI and Capacitor for the Android and iOS native wrappers, and the Unity design system built with React only had components intended for the web and not native mobile apps.
We decided to use Konsta UI, a collection of iOS and Material Design components built with React and styled using Tailwind CSS. This approach required me to integrate both systems, utilize the libraries as foundational elements, and customize them according to our design specifications.
High Fidelity
After establishing the app's overall structure and flow, we created high-fidelity designs that adhered to the Unity design system constraints while ensuring a consistent appearance across different operating systems.
This is a sample of the screens I designed; the app now includes various screens that accommodate multiple features.
Challenges
No system is perfect. It wasn't easy to manage the different design systems and integrate them to create a cohesive and enjoyable user experience. However, designing the app became a delight once everything started to come together. Additionally, the requirements were not clearly defined; we often had to figure things out through discussions with missionaries and stakeholders to uncover their pain points and motivations.
The work is not over...
This app is designed to support missionary work, recognizing that challenges and new requirements will continually emerge. One of our goals is to make the app adaptable based on the Missionary's current stage: pre-MTC, during the MTC, and post-MTC. We also aim to support Service Missionaries, another key group, and I may address that in future updates.