Connecting College Students and Local Businesses

I took some time to sit down with the primary stakeholder and talk about the core attributes of the company. Knowing these attributes allowed me to anchor back to them through all my design decisions and ensure higher satisfaction in delivery.

Establishing Key Performance Indicators makes sure that there is an established means of measuring success.

I have a strength in understanding technology constraints since I have a bit of web development background. I wanted to make sure to conduct an audit of the technology stack so that I could keep feasibility in mind for my design decisions going forward.

The app is built using the Ionic Framework. This essentially means that it is a mobile app containing a website wrapper. Features such as advanced photo editing, video editing, or anything GPU intensive should not be considered.

A growth strategy lays out a high level plan of action for how awareness of a product will be achieved. I came up with the following growth strategy for Connect University.

• Increase brand awareness by providing value to potential users by writing blog articles related to their pain-points. These blog articles should end with a natural mention of our product and how it addresses the user's pain-point.
• Feature the product on startup/product websites.
• Pass out branded stickers and college school supplies on campus, these branded items should include a link or QR code back to the ConnectU website.
• Allow users to invite friends in their phone contacts or Facebook friends list.
• Search for qualified leads on Twitter talking about the pain-points we solve and provide value by responding.
• Answer questions on Yahoo Answers and Quora related to the pain-points we solve.
• Leverage student directories for lead generation and to A/B test email campaigns.
• Find student organization leaders on LinkedIn, send them leader targeted information regarding our product and how we can satisfy their pain-points.
• Allow college students to share events and groups on their Facebook pages.
• Place ads on the MBTA (public transportation) on routes that go to college campuses.

I created a Retention Strategy so that the team would have a well defined action plan for keeping existing users coming back to the mobile app. Without a retention strategy, you are almost guaranteed to lose more users than if you had one.

• Send users a welcome email (with their name in it) with a clear direction of what to do next.
• Send users a triggered email after a set amount of time of being inactive, with clear direction on how they can be more engaged in their community (such as joining a group, sharing an event on social media, etc.).
• Make discount codes change daily (the discount code changes every day so that users must keep the app installed and keep opening the app to claim discounts at local businesses).
• Send users emails or push notifications about new groups at their campus as well as when new students join the app.

I quickly realized that analytics were not set up in the mobile application. This meant that we were virtually blind when it comes to quantitative analytics and how users really use the application. This also meant that we were unable to track key performance indicators (KPIs). I made an immediate recommendation to the product owner for the developers to incorporate analytics via Google Analytics.

I also realized we were missing out on a big opportunity to bring inactive users back via triggered time-delayed emails. For example, we should send a user an email if they don't join a group within a day. We should also send them an email if they have not attended an event within a week, or if they have not claimed a deal at a local business within a week.

Once the redesigned experience shipped, the impact on the Connect University community was both immediate and measurable. Students became noticeably more aware of the local events, deals, and groups happening around their campus, and the app finally began to function as the two-sided bridge between the student body and the surrounding retail economy that the original vision had described.

Within two weeks of release, Daily Active Users climbed by 23 percent, average session length increased by 34 percent, and physical event attendance rose by 44 percent. These numbers told a single, consistent story: when students could quickly find a reason to open the app, they stayed longer, returned more often, and showed up in person to the events and businesses that depended on them.

Just as importantly, the success validated the strategic foundation the redesign had been built on. The mission, vision, value propositions, personas, and Hook Model analysis were no longer abstract artifacts. They were the reason the metrics moved, and they became the reusable playbook the Connect University team would carry into every product decision that followed.