Birth of a University Mobile App

One of the first projects I was handed after I started at Norwich University was responsibility for a mobile app. The conversation with my boss at the time went something like this.

“…and we need to work with Admissions on the mobile app.”

“What mobile app?”

“Admissions and the Development office have been talking about a mobile app.”

“How far along on are they?”

“One of the Alumns knows someone…”

“Okay. Goal? Audience? App, website, or responsive design?”

“Umm. Give them a call.”

It quickly became clear none of the homework had been done. I want to be clear these are smart people. They are very good at what they do but they don’t think in the same way that techies do. We think in terms of goals, scopes, outcomes, and timelines. It was an education on both our parts. After a short while, I corralled and worked with Danielle Krizan from the alumni office and together we established some criteria based on what we heard from the Admissions and Alumni offices. Essentially they liked a few of the key features of apps they had seen plus the novelty of reaching potential students and alumni in the mobile space. But they couldn’t articulate a clear goal. So we defined one for them.

Simple Goals

After doing research on how other universities & businesses were using mobile technology, we opted to see this app as a tool to help parents and potential students learn about us, provide contact information, provide news & events, and allow our students and faculty to interact. Really more of an on campus tool with some off-campus benefits but NOT as a replacement for our website.

After defining a minimum set of goals, Danielle and I researched vendors and created a spreadsheet based on what the vendors offered for functionality that we liked. This allowed us to compare them and see which vendor hit most of the items we liked. In the end we selected DubLabs.

Framework instead of custom app

The biggest reason I liked DubLabs was because it was a publishing framework rather than a custom app – a savings to the university of about $100,000. Plus, I wasn’t all that confident in my role as leader of this project. Every one had opinions about what they liked and didn’t like. They also seemed to have clear expectations yet no one could articulate them. As a framework, DubLabs is used by other higher ed institutions and the sample apps I downloaded had a modular feel but each university had their own content. That was appealing because we weren’t reinventing the wheel. All universities I know have admissions, alumni, and student populations that have very similar needs. So, it wasn’t a big stretch to think in terms of this modular approach and for the savings in $ and flexibility it was worth it.

Another item we liked was the app could tie into our backend systems and be used as a tool to help facilitate communications and data sharing. The DubLabs app is designed:

…to provide students & faculty access to Course Registration, Exam Schedule, Course Schedules, Course Map View, Announcements, Course Roster, Course Assignments, Course Discussions, Grades & Course Catalog.

It also had a lot of other great features for alumni, faculty and students (visit their website and you’ll see).

Don’t forget to include IT

This is where I made my big mistake. I know enough about computers and networks to know that I can push data back and forth through a firewall – from secure database to public display on the internet. But I didn’t know enough about mobile app development and the technology that DubLabs uses to talk to the database behind a firewall. And this is where our information security team put the kabosh on this portion of the project.  In a nutshell, the implementation of the data pipeline through our firewall wasn’t secure.  I was glad to learn about this gotcha but not so glad because it gutted some of the key features we were looking for – like all of the interactivity between the audiences and anything that pulled private data out and shared it with the user. Think student and their course schedule or grades.

Current Status

Last Friday we released the watered down version of the mobile app in conjunction with our university campus maps. You can download our app, NUMedia, from either Google Play or the Apple App Store. Check it out, I’m interested in feedback. I’ll post more about the project later.

The original spreadsheet we started with can be downloaded here. While we started with this, we didn’t update it after we realized that DubLabs had what we wanted.