Introduction of the SNHUdent Life App
We will be creating an app for Southern New Hampshire University’s recreational activities. Our decided name for the app will be SNHUdent Life. It will offer information about sports, clubs, and entertainment events happening around campus for on-campus and nearby online students, as well as faculty and staff. This app is different from simply Googling when a music group is performing or scrolling through the tedious extracurricular news page on mysnhu.edu or even hunting down flyers to find out when the SNHU baseball team is playing its next game. Students, faculty, and staff alike will finally be able to find what they are looking for in a quick and easy way. With this centralized and straight-forward approach to getting involved, anyone at SNHU can quickly find and plan a fun activity without sacrificing too much of their precious studying time.
Target Market
Our app will be targeting both on-campus and online students, staff, and faculty. Our goal as app developers is to make SNHUdent Lifean enjoyable experience by allowing the SNHU community to feel more connected and have fun during their Penmen experience. Whether it’s a student who attends the Manchester campus or is taking online classes in the next state over, our app will be indispensable for those who want to get involved. We expect most off-campus students to participate from nearby locations, but any online student who is willing to travel may also participate in SNHUdent Life.
Assets
We plan to use fontsquirrel.com for any specialty fonts used in our app. Fontawesome.com will be used to provide the icons which represent social media links, email links, website links, user account information, and specific sports, clubs, or entertainment information. The images on the SNHUdent Life app will consist of our own photography, images from the SNHU website, and stock libraries. Lastly, jquery.com will be used to get the code for forms, menu bars, tabs, scrolling, sliders, and image placement.
Financial Plan
Since we are “unpaid interns” for GRA 410, we will not be recompensed for our labor with monetary payment. Our CEO, Professor Tadros, will be “financing” the production of our app. We plan to make SNHUdent Life downloadable from the App Store with no charge attached. We believe that by having a free app, it will allow members of the SNHU community to be able to get the information that they need quicker and easier. It is well understood that students in college don’t have much money to spend. “Snhudents” can rest assured, as all the information about SNHU sports, clubs, and entertainment is provided to them for free through the app.
Competition
One competitor for the SNHUdent Life app is SNHU Connect. It is a site in which online students can communicate and share information with each other. Although this site can be used for finding information on upcoming SNHU events, it is all based on making connections and sharing posts. There is currently no source of event information available on the site itself. The SNHUdent Life app will be a resource for students to get information about upcoming SNHU sporting competitions, clubs, and entertainment events. While the app will have accounts for users, its primary purpose is to give students easy access to all events on campus.
After viewing the SNHU Connect site, we have noticed several glitches and problems within the system. Notifications from other users either don’t get received entirely or take a long time to load. There are too many menu tabs that are not categorized logically. The logout option is difficult to find because it is buried within an obscure menu tab. Overall, SNHU Connect’s information and placement of its content is not organized in a way that enhances the user experience.
The second competitor is the university’s Penmen Fan App. It is intended as the primary means for fans to participate in sporting events at SNHU. It has a calendar of events, as well as a rewards system based on checking in at game locations. The more games and events that fans attend, the more points they receive to put toward winning prizes. There are not a lot of people who use it, but those that do can get very competitive. This shows that there is some market upon which to capitalize. However, the app has been crashing quite frequently due to a glitch in the notifications. Another point to mention is that this app is for sports only. The Penmen Fan App is missing a large part of students’ interests. This is the gap SNHUdent Life plans to fill.
The last relatively-similar app to SNHUdent Life that will be covered is actually the one that sparked our idea for our own app. The MyNCCapp for Nashua Community College is essentially a local and closed version of Facebook. Since the audience is limited to students, faculty, and staff, there are no random people outside of the NCC community. The closed account system posed a problem however, as a noticeable number of students had trouble with their assigned college email. The developers of SNHUdent Life are dedicated to easy and secure account creation and log in. The MyNCC has a well-organized calendar feature, though it is mainly used for academic deadlines. The only way events were advertised was through individual Facebook-style posts from users. SNHUdent Life plans to advertise events directly through a calendar feature instead, similar to the Penmen Fan App. One notable aspect to mention about NCC is that unlike SNHU, it does not have sports teams. SNHUdent Lifewill show what SNHU has to offer, and will give more abilities for users than the NCC app.
Conclusion
SNHUdent Lifewill be the best option for Penmen who are looking to get involved with clubs, entertainment, and sports on campus. The assets used to create the app are free, reliable, and will enhance the visual design and function of the app. Rather than using multiple, highly specific competitor apps, Penmen can gain an all-in-one student life experience.By having a quick, easy, and straight-forward setup, SNHUdent Life leaves plenty of time to balance schoolwork and enjoying fun events around campus.