St. Edward’s University Mobile App

Background

I was studying for my MBA in St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX when I found out about this student worker position. They were looking for redesigning their mobile app. This job was perfect for me considering my background in design, UX and coding. I also wanted to get familiar with working environment and culture here in US. Furthermore, as an international student, I was only allowed to work within the campus.

Different mockups I created for the app

My role

I worked as the designer in the project. We had a third party app development company who had certain design limitation that I had to work with.

Design process

Research
I started the research with a group of students asking them questions like why they don’t use the current mobile app, what would be useful to them etc. I also looked at other university’s app to get ideas.

Design 
I wanted to give the app a flat look using flat icon and buttons but I did include few other design as demanded from steak-holders. There were few screens to design for- splash screen, home screen, news screen, video screen and search screen.

Testing
We wanted to test the different designs of the prototype. We asked students if they are interested in volunteering for this. We got quite positive responses. We had a team of 45 students to whom we presented these screen. 

Handover
We had a very positive response from the student groups we tested on. They loved how the new design made the app look simple and modern. They also like the big images and video areas in articles and video pages.

Different screen layouts of different mockups

I worked in version 1.0 of this app which was released in app store in Nov 15, 2012.  The app was designed for both iPhone and iPad. It requires iOS 6.0 or later.