Developing the ICS NIT Rourkela app
Institute Counselling Services(formerly SCP and SCS) app is an effective bridge between the students and the counselling services. This article provides an insight into the thoughts of one of the developer of the app, the execution of the development process, and the user reception.
The Inspiration
Today, in the times of organizations using AI chatbots basic queries, Virtual Reality for a guided tour of their campus, and technologies like Actions on Google(AoG) to make the interaction more humane, our institute(NIT Rourkela) has had only one major app serving its populace with campus-related information on the go, the Monday Morning app. This was about to change, courtesy Developer Student Clubs NIT Rourkela Chapter(DSC NIT Rourkela, an initiate under Google Developers), who were relatively new a concept on the campus back in 2019(a decade ago!), and looking for the first big project.
With a large pool of student mentors, weekly scheduled counselor and psychiatrist visits, and a whole building to its name, Institute Counseling Services(ICS), was taking huge strides at ensuring counselling for Academic, Financial, Mental and Sociology-cultural issues to the students. We at DSC NITR saw this as a great opportunity to collaborate with ICS and come up with a mobile app, which would bridge the gap between the student and ICS.
As an outcome of lack of taxonomical intellect on our team, we resorted to the naming our projects akin to the nomenclature followed by Google for android versions, albeit a bit healthier, fruits! What better than starting off with an a̵p̵p̵l̵e̵, avocado? (No Apple, Google is watching us!)
The interaction
Every academic year, each of the fresher is allocated a mentor, which means that every academic year, we could reasonably estimate a minimum number of users downloading the app(more users are of course welcome). But the real credit to the app developer lies in the user retention and daily user interaction with the app, which in today's fast-paced day and age, is something large corporations would pay a fortune for!
Our college uses a central timetable which is a nightmare to decode for the freshers, and a timetable decoder in the app would ensure that the student would surely click open the app to check for a free period the day India has a match!
Earlier, the students had to book a slot for a counselor or a psychiatrist by going in person. ICS app aimed at making this a one click affair, by implementing means to simplify the slot booking process while maintaining the authenticity of it(no bogus slot bookings)
Decoding a central timetable has two parts, a theory section and a practical section, an intersection of these gives you the timetable.
The Implementation
Flutter has taken the app development world by storm, starting from being one of the fastest growing frameworks to being able to run on just about anything, offering drool-worthy 60fps rendering and fancy animations. You can see why its the apple of our eye!
We had all our assets and databases at our disposal when we realized the format in which we had our FAQ database. The questions and answers contained basic HTML tags for billeting, hyperlinks etc, handling which was a pain in the rear for Flutter back when we were developing the app. So yeah, we had to use platform channels and develop FAQ using native framework
The main issue regarding this app was regarding prevention of bogus slot booking. We implemented Firebase Mobile Authentication and Firebase Firestore to maintain the slot booking database. Firebase helps us developing a full-fledged app while not worrying about backend, and there are a lot of features which could be implemented in the future, so we saw it as an absolute win!
From wire framing to beta testing, the app was developed over a course of two months during the summer of 2019, ready to be put to test on the onset of the new academic year.
The Impression
With ICS on our side, all the freshers were asked to make full utilization of the app, and by the numbers on our Firebase Dashboard, utilization of app they did!
A key point to remember is that there are about 1000 first-year students, so having a user base of 1600 means that our app had gained users from other demographics as well. The cyclic nature of 1-day retention is due to the fact that no sane minded person would check his/her timetable on weekends.
The near perfect crash free user experience is because of Flutter. While we developers took care of several edge cases, credit also goes to Flutter to handle the UI flexibly on different Android versions and various OEMs.
We see about a two fold increase in 1 day usage, while we have retained about 80% of our user base as compared to our first month of usage, which means that while our user installs has decreased, our user retention and interaction has increased over time, which is a testimony of the usefulness of the app.
DSC NITR had taken part in HacktoberFest 2019, in which we had put up project-avocado as one of the projects where developers from far and wide could contribute, and contribute they did! We had contributions on 2 issues on this repository, good for a first-timer, right!
As of writing this article, our app has been downloaded over 2000 times, which is around a third of the total NIT Rourkela student populace. This is the first mobile app that any club/group had developed for the Institute in official capacity, and we hope that the institute continues placing their faith in DSC NITR and the developer community at large.
The artists - Reuben Abraham (UI & UX), Abel Mathew (DSC lead and Developer), Ankesh Anku(Developer), Smarak Das(Developer) and Chinmay Kabi(Developer)
Contribute to our project- https://github.com/developer-student-clubs-nitr/project-avocado
Link to our app- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.ac.nitrkl.scp.scp
Read more about the design process of the app- https://medium.com/dsc-nit-rourkela/designing-for-easier-access-to-mental-healthcare-e35a14699de6
