AWS Summit 2019 - Session 8: Mobile engagement w Arizona State

Mobile at AWS

two popular frameworks - ReactNative and Ionic

• AWS Device Farm for mobile testing
  • real time remote device access for testing #todo
  • $0.17 per minute, 1000 free minutes up front AWS AppSync - unified graphql

ASU Mobile app

• Problem
  • ASU has over 114,000 students
  • bombarded with email
  • engagement should be with personal, timely, and actionable content
  • build their own communities
  • email, web-based portal (pull not push)
  • being able to schedule content for different groups (events, clubs, etc)
  • design with student (member) at the start, not faculty/staff
• Solution
  • user-centered design
    • specific problems were identfied
    • 700 people were watched/profiled/engaged (student councils, student surveys, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews)
    • All React Native and microservice/serverless architecture
    • Used AWS AppSync because it works offline, which works much better with mobile
    • links to reporting backend so they can do longterm graduation support
• Key Features
  • Push and in-app notification
  • Transpo and real-time parking map
  • personalized greeting and content - integrating over 20 backends into one frontend
    • they are themselves tagged/can choose their tags, which apply to the CMS and customizes student news
  • weather was a huge request (Jay Behr, Utility [book])
  • personalized schedule, linked to their LMS (Blackboard), create reminders
  • digital ticketing for sports events integrated
    • has school color flashing ability for fun
  • Classes show who else is in class, you can follow them and see where they go and what they do, beta'ing chat, requires mutual acceptance
• Adoption & Results
  • the old app was 7 years old and had 13k downloads
  • 317% growth to 91k users SINCE AUGUST
  • across all socio-economic, highly correlated student retention with app use
  • engagement metrics
    • unique users per week 25k
    • average 2 sessions per day
    • average user is 3.5 minutes per day
    • average number of clicks is 25 per day, stats show engagement not confusion
    • 1m notifications since August
• Future
  • Just launched Alumni version
  • Host city engagement

LMS is Canvas/Instructure - they mostly just funnel in the notifications from LMS to encourage students to go into LMS

we have to take planning and feedback more seriously - especially planning, we bias toward feedback because people naturally want to complain after the fact

student survey was the biggest definer/getting the ball rolling
automation as security - people don't see the content
chat? basically just lawyer said don't worry about it