University timetable s01e03: season finale

Earlier in the series

We do the mobile service "University Schedule" . Schedules are added by entire universities or faculties, which distinguishes us from projects, where adding schedules is just one of the organizer options.

In 2013, we received about 50,000 users, of which about 20% are active. We added over 60 universities across Russia and hooked Ukraine, released applications for iOS, Android and Windows Phone and made a mobile site for all other phones.

Active users (by month) for the Android application.


Active users (by month) for the iOS application.


Active users (by month) for a WP-application.
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Windows phone

The number of installations on the vinfonah was less than we expected, inspired by the analytics of the Russian smartphone market. This year, the share of Windows Phone is equated to the share of iPhones, but in fact, the viphones gave us 3,000 installations out of 50,000.

However, we nominated a vinfon application in the Microsoft contest (do not forget to vote if you are a student or if you just want to help us) and are looking for a volunteer who is ready to develop the application further.

I also thank Alexander Dubin, who made the application for Windows 8. But without design, you cannot start it - if there is a person among you who is ready to make a simple design for win8, we will be grateful.

Mobile site

Not so many visitors come to the mobile site, but we noticed an unexpected effect on attracting search traffic.

The schedule contains a lot of content that is not found elsewhere. For example, the names of teachers. For us, this was a pleasant surprise, and we are now wondering how to convert this traffic into installations.

So far, they have come up with the idea that for those who came from desktops, we are showing the banner that we have mobile apps. (For those who came from mobile - and so the “sticker” for their platform is shown on top.) We will be glad to hear your ideas.

Missing universities

In mobile applications, we finally realized the presence of all universities for which we do not have a schedule. The schedule did not appear from this, but now the person has the opportunity to leave an email, to which he will receive a letter with instructions on what to do in order for the schedule to appear.

AUTO Timetable

We have integrated with the program for scheduling AVTOR (it is - Autosheet ). In the nearest supplement, the function of schedule export to our format (json according to our specifications) is already available.

If you use this program in your university, your university can integrate with us with ease.

We will also be happy to integrate with other programs for scheduling, so if you have these, write.

“Overheard” for ITMO

We tried to make such an experiment - only on android and only for ITMO high school.

We took records from the public VKontakte "Overheard in ITMO" and brought them in a separate section in the application with the ability to add new rumors (they are already visible only in the application). Furora has not yet produced it, but we thought that the idea could at least be checked - what do you think?

Ending

We have a short season - literally three episodes. The first semester begins in September, the second - in January-February. Each semester start is a lot of work on adding a schedule. It will take one or two weeks, and we will be overwhelmed with new timetables.

Session, thank God, is over, we have time to think. Many students say that having memorized the schedule for a month, they no longer use the application. There are, of course, universities, where the schedule changes every week. But the relevance of such a schedule - and harder to maintain.

In our questionnaire for users, the HSE student described the goal of our project: “Globally: make life easier for students”. This is true, thoughts about the inter-university community, a service for assessing the quality of education with the aim of improving it, and finally about a reference book on student life — roam in our heads throughout the first season.

For us as a startup, the last semester was a challenge. Will we be able to make our product a quality, interesting public? Simply put, can we "shoot"? And this call comes back ...

And we have ideas. We want to expand the functionality by adding features that are useful in student life: from evaluating couples to sharing materials between students, from group chat to a vacancy ribbon for students.

And what features would you suggest? For the perfect app for a student that you never had.

upd: we saw a few drawbacks to the post, it’s generally interesting what they put it for. We discussed, we decided to try to just ask. If you minus the post, we will be grateful if you leave a comment “for what”. We want to be better. Thank.