A campus mobile app succeeds when it feels essential to student life, not like one more system students are expected to check.
- Student adoption increases when the app brings critical services, timely content, and real usefulness into one mobile-first experience.
- Ongoing student feedback helps institutions shape features, priorities, and personalization around real campus needs.
- Sustainable app success depends on strong integrations, cross-team ownership, and a roadmap that keeps evolving after launch.
Modo customers share how their efforts to develop a virtual campus portal increase student focus and success.
For colleges, having a powerful, integrated campus mobile app is no longer a “nice to have” but a “must-have.” Mobile native students have raised the bar for the features and functionality they want and expect to see on a college student app. As a result, many institutions have reenvisioned their digital campus experience and placed greater prominence on their campus mobile app to support student success.
What does it take to design a successful college student app?
Modo’s Matt Willmore recently spoke with digital leaders at the University of North Dakota, Northern Arizona University, and Penn State about their app development experience. Common themes that emerged:
- Students should be involved in each stage of app development – Modo’s low-code/no-code development tools make this possible
- Team engagement helps curate campus and area services most important to students
- App development resources need to be confirmed for ongoing support
- Modo platform simplifies the integration of existing and new tools into the campus app
- Team collaboration ensures the sustainability of the app
Here are some of the valuable tips and lessons learned they shared.
University of North Dakota achieves 98% download rate for their user-centered mobile app
Madhavi Marasinghe, CIO at the University of North Dakota (UND), shared that her team’s first attempt to launch a campus app failed. In 2022 they tried again – this time partnering with Modo.
The university has about 14,000 students, including the medical school, aerospace department, and law college. Initial buy-in for the new campus app started through conversations with students.
“On average, today’s first-year college students were three years old when the iPhone came out and now use their phones for everything,” said Marasinghe. “So, we knew the app had to be user-centered to be successful.”
Her team quickly learned that students are eager to adopt a virtual one-stop shop. Previously, students had to log into numerous campus systems to retrieve needed information. Now, they can log in to a single campus app to access blackboard, grades, billing, communication, and more.
As a result, the app’s download rate has reached 98%— a KPI Marasinghe is excited to report. KPIs continue to be measured to understand how people use the app and identify improvement areas.
With Modo’s support and student input, the UND app development team continued to integrate systems into the app for a robust and seamless user experience. Just one semester into roll-out, the app received a design award.
Northern Arizona University adds Digital ID cards for a seamless campus app experience
Chad Stiller, AVP, IT at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff, explained that engaging students at every step of the app development process – from concept to design through development and launch – has been essential to the success of NAU’s campus app.
“This is absolutely their tool,” said Stiller. “Listening to their needs, their priorities…engaging your student body, whether through surveys or feedback in the app or having a seat on the governance. You have to have those voices to help you prioritize.”
In addition to integrating various student services and tools into its app, NAU worked with Modo to replace its JacksCard with fully digital IDs. Now students can use the campus app to access campus facilities, their residence halls, resources such as transportation and the gym, and make payments across campus with card funds.
The project required significant collaboration across teams — development, infrastructure, card services, dining teams, and external vendors. It also required NAU to shift its thinking of the app–from being a source of static content and information to being a critical component of the campus experience.
“[The project] forced us to up our game with [the use of] alerting and monitoring the resiliency and robustness of the data integrations to make these different platforms talk and work. [The digital ID] is part of our life safety program whereby students could potentially be locked out of their dorm in the middle of the night [if the app didn’t work].”
Penn State uses its campus mobile app to survey students about new features and designs
Ryan Seilhamer, Penn State Go Product Owner, shared that one of Penn State’s guiding principles is to provide a seamless student experience. With approximately 100,000 students, several commonwealth campuses across the state, and even a world campus, this is no easy feat.
“Our mobile app was kind of born out of that guiding principle,” said Seilhamer. “The idea that students could find resources anywhere, anytime, outside of [the classroom] …to make it easier for people to continue to stay in school and be successful.”
The Go app was released in 2020 and continues to evolve and incorporate new services. In addition to easy access to resources, the app provides fresh, dynamic content throughout the campus journey to maintain student interest and use. Students, faculty, and staff curate this content.
To inform its product roadmap, Seilhamer’s team engages students regularly in beta testing and surveys and assigns them leadership roles in the app’s development and design processes.
“We meet with [student leaders] regularly to ask them: How’s it going? What do you want to see? What’s new? What are you hearing from other students? We [also] do quite a few [in-app] surveys during the year to figure out what we are doing right and wrong. It’s amazing…I’ll get a couple of hundred responses within an hour of putting out a survey.”
Like the other universities interviewed, Penn State is exploring avenues for increased personalization. For example, their app already delivers custom campus experiences for students, faculty, staff, alums, parents, and families.
What makes a campus app indispensable to students in 2026?
In 2026, the bar for campus apps is higher than simply offering mobile access to campus systems. Students expect one connected experience that helps them move through the day with less friction, whether they are checking schedules, using digital ID, finding resources, or getting answers in the moment.
That shift makes the most successful campus apps feel less like a collection of links and more like a digital layer across the student experience. EDUCAUSE’s 2025 Students and Technology Report says the student experience is being shaped by technological change, flexibility, and well-being, while Modo now positions campus apps and portals as one AI-powered, mobile-first experience.
For institutions, that raises the standard. The app has to be useful enough to earn a place on a student’s home screen, flexible enough to reflect different journeys, and connected enough to deliver value long after launch. The schools that get this right are not just building an app students can use. They are building a campus experience students actually want to return to every day.
Interested in building a custom campus app for your school? Request a demo of Modo Campus.