Santander. Apps for 32 universities

• Banco Santander, through Santander Universities, has among its main strategic axes to accompany Spanish universities in their digital transformation with the aim of supporting them in the creation of 100% digital campuses.

• As the main lever to achieve this, we launched the AppCrue project, a digital platform of open and collaborative innovation at the service of Universities.

  A customizable project for the differente university audiences and facilities of which we are very proud.

• Unifying so different services and needs focused on the student in a single application became an important challenge on many levels.

• Getting to know the different types of profiles

  Not only could we focus on the student, many other profiles acted and interacted with the application, from teachers to library staff had to have their corner within the application.

  How we arranged the information and how we nurtured the application should not be defined unilaterally by the needs of the students, but also by all the other stakeholders.

• Establish product architecture

  If you stop to analyze the number of actions that a student can perform in the university context, you end up discovering that the amount of information to organize and prioritize … is crazy!

  We designed exercises to work the information architecture with the user and different stakeholders, and even so, we had to iterate as we tested the application.

• How to work with more than 30 universities

  The problem of working with so many universities is not a problem of displacement as one might think a priori, but rather that each one of them works differently, and despite having common denominators, the processes are totally different.

  Working with cases of maximums and minimums, creating a consistent application for each university and adapting the visual code to associate it with each one of them, impacting as little as possible on the technological development of the project, was a challenge.

• Integration of technological services

  At Redbility we surround ourselves with the best companies to program digital products. In this case, we had to coordinate with the Banco Santander team. Imagine that if each university has its needs and services for the student, of course it will have its technological platforms and its own developments.

  To create an application that could meet the needs of each university, close coordination with the technological development team was an essential requirement, since they provided the possibilities and limitations of each university.

Having clear objectives guarantees the success of the project

• Unify management

  Many of the procedures that a student can perform are centralized from the application, which is a great advantage, since they have access to them from the same place.

• Centralization of official communication

  Universities have an official communication platform easily accessible to students. Grades information and communication with teachers, newsletters, news …

• Hiring additional services

  Students can pay for the services that they usually had scattered in different parts of the university, even with the obligation to do so physically, like library payment or parking tickets.

• Research techniques applied

  Benchmarking: In order to have references of the best practices in functionality, interaction design and services used, applications from universities available in the market were analyzed.

  Definition of Archetypes: In order to correctly align the objectives of the project, we analyze the needs of the users to understand what they need and offer them a really useful product.

  Usability test with Eye Tracker: tests were carried out with students from the 10 universities that had already implemented the app, designed by the association of Spanish universities, to know their satisfaction rate, what gaps or unmet needs they detected and / or type of difficulties they had when using it.

• Strategy and conceptualization

  We land the strategic bases that support the project, based on the insights obtained. We focus on proposing solutions that allow us to meet the established objectives.

  To validate the defined strategy, we proposed a “concept” that we could validate with all the players before immersing ourselves in the detailed functional definition for the development and design of the entire product. In this way we make sure that the decisions made are correct and the construction of the product is carried out in the most efficient way.

• The AppCrue has achieved in 2018 results that guarantee the good reception of the project. In a single year it has become the usual means of communication for universities with their community. In addition, the number of downloads and active users per month has tripled, from 62K downloads and 23k active users, to 190K downloads and more than 71K users.