Dr. Meghan Dougherty COMM 400
I am Loyola PROJECT PROPOSAL
Leopold Stuebner SJ October 2014
A private space The I Am Loyola app is only available to users with a valid @luc.edu email address. Usage limitations and two factor validation protect this privacy.
A story untold. Loyola University Chicago promises to prepare people to lead an extraordinary life. To keep this promise to the 15,902 students more than 4,000 passionate faculty and staff members work hard every day. This is their story. The I am Loyola app is a travel guide on your journey through Lake Shore Campus and Water Tower Campus and helps you to get to know people you would never meet otherwise. Each portrait of an individual provides photography and a short interview and also offers the possibility to say a quick “Thank You�, all with a swipe of your finger. Care for community is an important part of the Loyola Student Promise. This app helps to explore the diversity of people that work with Loyola and fosters community building. This project focuses mainly on the technology and infrastructure of this app, but with extensibility built in it can become a helpful tool for the Loyola Community. The content delivery infrastructure is designed for scalability and can be adapted for future use scenarios.
Who is near me? Stories sort dynamically based on the users location and can also be displayed as a map. If the user moves around campus the sorting will adjust.
Easy to use Navigation The navigation between the single stories is entirely based on multi touch, providing the user with a familiar and intuitive experience.
A true digital native. When Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone in 2007 he described it as an iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator. It took the audience a moment to realize that he was not talking about three different devices but about a one single new revolutionizing story-telling-tool. Scholars talked long before 2007 about media convergence and the personalization of media consumption, but with the launch of the iOS device family true personalized multimedia story telling became a reality. I am Loyola makes use of Apple’s latest technologies and is and makes use of it to provide a true mobile digital story telling experience. The native app is written in Swift, a programming language design for mobile software. Apple’s multi-touch technology is the foundation for the easy to use navigation and gives the interaction with the app a more natural feeling. CoreLocation enables location based sorting of available stories. A future version could employ Apple iBeacon technology to actively notify a user when a available story is nearby.
Schedule 11/3/14
User interface design User experience design API and data model
11/17/14
UI/UX Implementation Server and content delivery infrastructure E-mail validation
12/11/14
Beta testing phase Content production
Dec ‘14
Submission of the final build to Apple for review
Jan ‘15
Available on the Apple App Store
Skills Exercise: Design Every App needs a beautiful app icon. I will try to come up with an design, that represent the app and also blends in with Loyola’s CI. Skills Exercise: Writing An app in the App Store comes with a lot of meta data and marketing text: App descriptions, a website with informations and policies are required by Apple.
Work Area Ahead. Building an awesome app is a major effort and needs in-depth planning. With Swift this projects builds on a recently released programming language. Naturally the amount of available documentation and tutorials is limited. Therefore the first weeks of this project are dedicated to acquiring the necessary programming skills. Stories are dynamically loaded at launch time and can be added independently from submitting an updated version to the App Store. The app will be available on iOS devices running iOS 7 or iOS 8 only and is currently planned without native iPad support.
You are invited. Get I am Loyola on the App Store in January 2015