Our recent webinar, The (Digital) Art of the Possible: Envisioning the Digital Campus Experience, featured innovative and inspirational ideas from three schools demonstrating digital experience leadership.
Northern Arizona University, Vassar College, and California State University at Northridge have adopted three critical design best practices that have fueled their digital innovation and student engagement. Read on to learn these best practices and how they were leveraged.
1. Use Personas to Define Content and the User Experience
For a campus app to address real user needs, product teams must understand the intended users’ behaviors, goals, challenges, motivations, needs, interests, etc. In product development, this information is compiled into a user persona–a semi-fictitious representation of a product’s ideal user group.
User personas help product teams customize every aspect of a mobile app to a specific user group’s preferences and needs. Everything from branding and in-app content to functionality, features, and the UI must resonate with target users.
A great example of how personas are used to personalize the experience is Northern Arizona University’s (NAU) New Student Orientation. Powered by Modo Campus, the NAUgo app experience is driven by several user personas: Flagstaff Campus student, Statewide Campus student, Faculty/Staff, Guest, Parent, and New Student.
The Orientation Persona is a temporary app profile that provides content to new students before, during, and after orientation. Content is customized further based on whether the student participates in a virtual or in-person orientation. The app introduces incoming students to NAU features and keeps them engaged before arriving on campus. Following orientation, students “graduate” to the campus student persona.
Rather than presenting students with a large packet of information, the experience is architected to display relevant information to students at different steps along their journey. Before orientation, students see pre-arrival lists; information on travel, packing, and climate; and details for setting up an advising appointment. Once on-site/day of orientation, students see parking information and directions, check-in details, and way-finding/maps to orientation venues. See below for samples of their orientation content.
The app has also helped the campus with its sustainability goals. Content available inside the application reduces the need for printed material and lowers the school’s carbon footprint. Content can be updated at any time and deployed immediately to the app.
View the on-demand webinar to learn more about the NAUgo information architecture and how the school uses surveys to enhance its content.
2. Have a Governance and Communications Plan
When you develop your app design and content plan, it is vital to establish a clear governance process. This framework clarifies roles, responsibilities, and authority over decisions, gives everyone a shared understanding, and drives consistency.
After Vassar College launched its mobile app, IT wanted to ensure that as the app evolved, it would continue to serve the Vassar community. Therefore, community involvement was critical. The outcome was the creation of the Vassar Mobile Working Group. The group consists of citizen developers representing a cross-section of Vassar and is responsible for ensuring the app meets the needs of all users.
Vassar also developed a communications plan that contains guidelines and tools for messaging. The plan includes the in-app messaging process, delivery requirements (e.g., only one personal-level push notification per day), app platform access details, branding guidelines, a graphic toolkit, content templates, and more.
For visibility into upcoming messages and to streamline the messaging creation and approval process, Vassar uses Modo Communicate Premium. The module includes delegated access and automated approval workflows that can be customized for specific message types and users.
3. Design for Multi-Channel Experiences
Many campuses have focused on their mobile apps and the mobile experience. Now that students are back in the classrooms, they are on their laptops and tablets and want to access their class schedule, campus tools, dining menus, and more from different devices. This shift has caused universities to revisit their outdated portals and consider how they can improve the experience.
This was the case for California State University at Northridge (CSUN). Their antiqued portal, built on a no longer supported platform, made navigation and finding information difficult. The university wanted something modern and flexible to meet the needs of students, staff, and faculty.
Feedback revealed that users wanted personalization, relevant content, and the portal to be a tool, not a catch-all. The focus of the new portal would be to bring information to the user rather than the other way around – something users had become accustomed to with their campus app.
CSUN was using Modo Campus for its campus app but didn’t know the Modo platform could also deliver a seamless, easy-to-use desktop experience. Using Modo, CSUN quickly developed a new portal with different experiences and content than their mobile app. And with Modo’s customization features and out-of-the-box integrations, they could add PeopleSoft data to the portal.
After the portal’s initial launch, CSUN continued to gather feedback to drive enhancements and adjustments.
Check out The (Digital) Art of the Possible: Envisioning the Digital Campus Experience webinar to learn more about CSUN’s planning process and other campus technologies integrated into its portal.