Brown Student Agencies launched the online version of a new digital application earlier this month, in the first step toward releasing an official University-run app that distributes news at Brown and information from the local community.
BSA’s new app provides online users with links to events and dining hall menus, news from Providence and contact information for the University’s departments and divisions. The app, which can be found at m.brown.edu, will be available to download for free onto both Apple and Android devices starting this spring.
A BSA development team headed by Elisabeth Berger ’14 and Connor Shinn ’14 created the app in conjunction with Computing and Information Services, which aided with producing the technical structure. App developers said they have been working on the project for nearly two years.
“We took a poll of about 350 students in the nascent stages of this project and asked them what they thought about a mobile app for Brown,” Shinn said.
Students who completed the BSA’s poll highlighted an events calendar, a campus map, news updates and dining menus as the top items they wanted to see included in an app, Shinn said. “We tried to build all the highest priorities of Brown students into the app.”
“I find that there are so many events that go on on campus every day, and I was having a tough time combining all of my sources of events into one thing that I could look at and say, ‘What’s going on tonight?’,” Berger said, touting the app as a solution to scheduling issues, since users can find events for specific days or by looking at a monthly calendar.
Though the app currently features all of poll respondents’ top-rated priorities, some will be refined for the final product released in the spring, Berger and Shinn said.
“We’re looking at doing a better implementation of the dining menus so that they will be native in the app and you won’t have to go to the external webpage to access them,” Shinn said.
The finalized version of the app will also feature nutritional and allergy information about dining hall foods within the menu section, Berger said.
While developers said the app is particularly targeted at the on-campus community, they added that they hope their product will be a useful resource for anyone interested in the University.
“When prospective students are looking at colleges, one thing that they do is go to the app store,” Shinn said, noting that customers currently cannot download any official app from Brown. But with the app’s release this spring, prospective students “will be able to get a good sense of what Brown is all about,” Shinn said.
Administrators are working on building audio tools into the app’s final version, said Chief Information Officer Ravi Pendse. The University hopes that by this spring, campus visitors will be able to listen to information about various buildings and locations via auditory narration on the app, Pendse said.
The University provided supplementary funding to BSA to create the app, Shinn said. Now that the beta version of the app has launched, BSA will continue to provide input on content and design features, but the app will be updated and maintained by CIS, he said.
Though some students said they have not yet heard of the BSA’s app, Arianna Diaz ’17 said she is looking forward to its launch.
“I will definitely download the app for my phone when it becomes available,” Diaz said. “Events, weather and menus are things that I look at anyway, so it will just be more convenient to have them all in one place.”
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