Algonquin College Student support services

Mobile App Designer & Developer

ACHub is the name of the student support services department in Algonquin college. While a student on campus, I worked at the AC Hub part time. During the summer when I joined them full time, my busy-bee nature drove me to volunteer and create this AC Hub application. The target audience was employees like myself who sat at desks across the college. Our main goal was to help students with all types of questions. Many times the inquiries we received were hidden on the college website somewhere and not accessible. So the main purpose of the AC Hub App was to provide a forum for all that knowledge. I created the app in August 2015 and today it is still used by the staff after an update I pushed in late 2016.

Design Process

In order to understand what is needed, I did some initial user interviews with my colleagues and head of department. I collected and defined requirements and user needs, created basic information architecture and dived into low fidelity wireframes. Most of our inquiries were related to directions, contacts on campus, and we also has survey to fill about all inquiries we received. Accordingly, I created different sections in the app that addressed these concerns: surveys, FAQs, College directory, way finder and upcoming events. Since Ipad was the tool available to us, I decided to give the app a native iOS look by using the Ionic Framework.

I dove into coding, and created this simple interface that was very helpful to us staff for the years to come.

Application Demo

Conclusion

I was a passionate student eager to learn, and this app allowed me to learn so much as I designed and coded and tested on my own. I was the target audience and the business owner. It was a productive summer for me but the result is still a very valid tool for the ACHub staff.