Columbia Visit Apps

Once a year Columbia College Chicago hosts its largest recruitment event — Open House. This is an important opportunity to show what the college has to offer and provide prospective students with a fun, engaging, and memorable experience. I designed and developed a web app that allowed these students to create a personalized itinerary and navigate an unfamiliar urban campus. For years the college relied on a print program, but this web app brought the schedule to users’ devices and took advantage of modern technologies to enhance user experience.

Under the Hood

Columbia used this app over multiple years which allowed me to revisit how it was built, the features that it offered, and adapt it to smaller on-campus events as well. Initially built with Backbone.js I eventually migrated the codebase to React for a more componetized dev workflow. The design was also refined year to year and I added thoughtful user experience touches like pleasant animations and transitions (h/t animate.style).

I used the Mapbox API to customize our campus map for these events and was able to utilize prior work I’d done with the browser Geolocation API for an events listing page in order to accurately allow users to see where they were on campus.

Outcomes

Year after year this web app was used more and more. It became a crucial part of the event strategy and also allowed some analytic insights into which scheduled events were interacted with the most.