App Idea

• An app for centralised access to common university services for Australian University students.

• Signup and login with student email.

• Services are based on the university experience.
  • e.g. GPA calculator, Timetable Manager, Job-board. 

Details

• Users login with their university email.

• After login/signup, users can access services that assist in the university experience.

• We build a plugin-architecture for the services, making it easy to add new ones.

• We need to use our experiences at uni to dream up services that other students would use regularly if they were easily accessible.

Why signup?

• University websites are infamous for hiding the services most used by actual students.

• By building an app that allows all these common services to be readily used from mobile devices (but anywhere really), we have a value proposition for a relatively large market.

• We are concerned about how this could be tailored to students, improving their UX.

• Units across two universities
  • UON allocates course credit on the basis of blocks of 10 units
  • UNSW allocates on the basis of blocks of
    3 or 6 units
    • but some courses are 3 units which complicates the UON calculation strategy.

• So signup may allow for individual university catering opportunities.
  • ​Which increases marketability

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eg. GPA Calculation

eg 2. Timetabling

• Something that Universities do poorly on the whole is timetable management.

• We could provide a timetable creation service that allows students to enter in their courses and times, automatically building the timetable for them.

• This could be stored with the user profile so that they may reuse it. ​

Conceptual View

REST API

• The idea is to built a small but scalable solution for growth in the future.

• Targeting multiple platforms (client-side).

• An API makes handover more effortless.

Service Layer

• The web-services gig is effective for abstracting the common logic for services.

• Means we can add others easily, and it does not prevent us doing some work client-side if it makes sense.

handover - covered in the Business Potential section

User Profile

• The key thing we want to do is allow users to create a profile.

• The profile enables personalisation and storage of data for next time.

eg. persisting the grades of students can
      make GPA calculation be cumulative.

eg. another service might allow for creating
      and saving a timetable.

Business Potential

• Broadly, there are two ways of doing app development

1. Developing for yourself
    
2. Developing for a client

The 'Why?'

• We likely don't have the experience or money to grow our app into something that many thousands of people will use.

• So really what we're probably after in this early stage of our careers (especially for me) is to develop something that another party will want to buy. ​

• This establishes a nice item for our portfolio.

• Even if it doesn't land a buyer, we still have the app to show for it.

Target Audience

• Student Services Australia is a company that provides marketing for businesses targeting students.

• They also built LODE, which is a platform for allowing students / graduates to advertise themselves to potential employers
  • ​http://www.lode.com.au/

• SMA and LODE are the sort of companies that would be interested in acquiring an app like what we wish to build.