Overview
The official Texas A&M University mobile app is where you’ll find the most up-to-date information for students, employees and visitors. The mobile app gives you quick access to helpful information and resources to enhance your campus experience.
As assistant director of digital experience for Texas A&M Marketing & Communications, I highlighted the need for updating the user experience of the university’s mobile app. I gathered a small team and spearheaded the project, planning and leading a redesign with two team members on an ambitious .
The redesign project consisted of:
- research and discovery to find pain points and opportunities
- assessing the analytics of current app usage to formulate baselines
- defining project goals and success metrics
- analyzing and improving content strategy and user experience
Project Strategy
I structured the project using a UX design methodology, below. Some of the tools and exercises we utilized for the project included defining project goals and success metrics, competitor research, pain point discovery, user journey mapping, stakeholder interviews, sitemap audits, wireframing, design sprints, and micro-dot voting.
- Discover
- Define
- Develop
- Deliver
Overcoming Hurdles
At the end of the discovery phase, our app content management system (CMS) vendor released a major update to their content builder, prompting a decision to use the new or legacy interface for our redesign. Despite the tight timeline, I made the decision to fit the major version updates into the project and utilize the newly released CMS content builder to build our redesigned content. This route involved my team learning a new interface to build and style the redesigned screens as well as launching, QA testing and troubleshooting the version update in the CMS, but the results paid dividends.
App Promotion and Communications Plan
With the launch of the newly redesigned app, my team developed assets to promote the updated experience across digital channels. We designed and displayed digital signage promotions across the university campus featuring app download links through a trackable QR code immediately after the launch.
In the months following, I built and structured processes and documentation for strategic in-app messaging. The messaging feature was available before app management came under my team’s management but it was grossly underused. The new communications plan included processes, instructions for available message types and expectations for strategic app messaging to target audiences.