Partitioning Your App: Multi-Role/Multi-Location Apps

Presenters

Partition your app to create unique, personalized experiences for different users and different campus locations.

Melissa Harts, Pasco-Hernando

Pasco-Hernando is on the West Cost of FL
We have five different locations, all within about 30 minutes of each other
We have over 16,000 students
We are now a STATE college, not just a community college
We’ve experienced massive growth, and our app has helped us manage that.
Initially, we just wanted to HAVE a mobile app. I came from the K12 sector, and I had no idea how to build one!
Thankfully we had Modo Labs, which offered a package that met our needs.

INITIAL: most stuck with the default persona…about 85%; students were the ones who chose that.
AFTER: we really wanted personas to meet those folks we were targeting. We worked with each area to build out the materials in that persona (alumni, student development, etc.)
FUTURE PLANS: authentication (persona vs modules), personalized content, distinct landing pages, push notifications (sparingly), blogs/newsletters, student contests, community partnerships, student clubs (i.e. Mobius Literary magazine), we’re going also ask our students what they want.
What makes our personas distinct? Other apps (i.e. Canvas); other devices for information.

It’s tough to follow a student panel! What we’re trying to do is serve up the right content at the right time to the right people.
We’re located in Malibu, have satellite programs, about 8,400.
Mobile roadmap: mobile-friendly web sites; unified mobile app (UMA – Unified Mobile App), and specialized native/web apps
We’re championing a “one university” strategy.
The UMA provides everything in the same box.
We looked at role-based and school-based personas
School-based content is specific or dynamic based on what’s going on at the time
Alumni experience: we have about 20-30 screens that a student worker put together for us via the Kurogo app.
We’re thinking about an admissions experience as well for our Undergraduate team.
Shared a school-based personas graph.

Deeper, richer experience > More Utility > Greater Satisfaction
Practicality: GU is a complex org; main campus, law, continuing studies, Qatar
Context: multiple types of end-users; INITIALLY: welcome, current students, new students, alumni; NOW: student and staff, new student, alumni; FUTURE: investigating by school and department
We chose to merge some of our personas. INITIAL: New students and alumni; CURRENT: current students (retired this one), students, faculty and staff, Prospective students (GAAP).
We have a part-time designer who helps us build icons and such.
FUTURE: still TBD. We’re trying to understand the end user. Tasks versus information, spread across stakeholders of students & staff, new students, prospective students, alumni.
We’ve been pretty successful with our push notifications because of the partitioning. When the Pope was in town, we were able to send a note out to JUST the prospective students, which was really great.

Do you find good uptake among prospective students? EMIL: we’re not using the app to sell the school. We use it during the GAAP weekend. JOHN: on recruitment side, if someone comes into our app, they’re going to end up at a mobile responsive web look. MELISSA: we’re just targeting students to see what they’re looking at. We’re using it to market to them.
What’s the difference between locations and personas? EMIL: we follow the app convention, basing it on the location the user is at, then you pick a persona. JOHN: we landed at a “school-based” persona. Our business school doesn’t necessarily sync up as nicely because we have spread-out locations. MELISSA: we started out as location-based, but ended up with personas. ANDREW: with location, you can geo-fence locations.
Is there a way to automatically select a persona for a user? ANDREW: most schools do manual selection, but if you have a system that can provide user attributes, you can drive users toward a particular persona. EMIL: only one of our campuses (the main one) uses multiple personas. With GAAP, we do provide instructions for selecting this persona. JOHN: we initially used a “lead capture” process when people initially downloaded the app. MELISSA: our users self-select.