Project Goals
In Fall 2017 I worked as a project manager and developer on a team of 5 developers and designers to create a digital recruiting pamphlet app for the Drexel Graduate College of Biomedical Sciences and Professional Studies.
The team collaborated with a recruiter from the college as well as people from the communications and IT departments to plan the scope and timeline of the project.
Wrangling the Parts
We started out by creating styles and wireframes for the designs that we could test in front of users, while the development team began working on the structure of the app and the server.
We had to figure out exactly how much of the information on the website would be available in the app, and how the content would get into the app at a massive scale. We also needed to plan for making it available offline which was the main need for the app in the first place.
After working with the IT team, we determined that due to security and regulatory reasons, it would be better to scrape the content for the app than connect to the college’s database directly.
Building it Out
This meant our development team had to abandon the server late in the project and instead create a client side content scraper to sync the app before it is used.
This happened late in the project but once we started to get it working it was enjoyable.
As soon as the first usable version of the app was ready we began testing it with users so that we could incorporate the UX research and QA into our sprints in real time.
When the project was done we were able to present it to the dean of the college before it got approved for all the recruiters to use. The IT department then deployed it through iOS enterprise deployment, the first time Drexel released an app this way.
