PoliTO Students App: user centered development of an open source mobile application

Politecnico di Torino is one of the few italian universities having an internal Information Technology department, and this allows creating and maintaining a set of customized products and solutions. The goal of this thesis is to experiment a novel development methodology, whereby the development process of a student-facing set of functionalities (bundled in the official mobile app) is conducted in an open framework, for the first time. The new version of the official Student App is being developed as an open source project, with a user centered approach in design and development. Students are involved throughout the lifecycle of the product, both as product designers and developers, and in testing of the various prototypes. In this thesis, we initially focused on understanding user needs via interviews and questionnaires, then evaluated the UI of the current mobile application and those of other universities. The results of these analyses allowed us to build low-fidelity prototypes of the interface and test them with students to improve their experience before writing any code. After the analysis phase, a significant development process was conducted, in a mixed team with students, IT professionals, and external consultant, that resulted in the first public ‘beta’ version of the new application. The application is released as an open source project on the GitHub organization of the university, and will allow students or other stakeholders to directly contribute to it.