Making the U of T Mobile App Worth Opening

Final concept

Footprint turns campus movement into discovery, memory, and return motivation.

Instead of making the mobile app another place for links, the concept gives students a repeatable loop: discover a place, complete a quest, save a memory, collect a stamp, and return to uncover more of campus.

The app existed, but it had not become a student habit.

U of T had more than 100,000 students, but the mobile app had around 8,000 downloads and roughly 250 to 300 daily active users. Students already had Google, U of T websites, maps, group chats, friends, Instagram, Reddit, and other ways to find information.

The problem was not simply awareness. The app did not have a strong enough reason to be opened repeatedly.

Utility was not enough to explain engagement.

Early research pushed us away from asking what single practical feature was missing. Students already had workarounds for finding information. The more important question became why the app would matter in the first place.

Research stayed compact, but the questions changed.

We started with the current app and student feedback, then pivoted into campus connection, familiar spaces, memories, photos, exploration, and what students wanted to remember about U of T.

The strongest opportunity was emotional, not only informational.

The research pointed to a product direction that could make campus feel more personal while still staying lightweight enough for the existing app context.

Make campus exploration feel easy, personal, and worth remembering.

The feature could not feel like a complicated game. It needed to be a small layer of discovery inside the existing U of T app, grounded in real places and realistic to build.

The prototype was designed as a full student journey, not a single screen.

The flow covers first-time onboarding, map discovery, quest completion, stamp collection, memory saving, and semester recap. That matters because the concept only works if the return loop is visible.

The screen set makes the product mechanics inspectable.

These screens show how a student enters Footprint, finds places, starts a quest, saves a memory, and builds a collection over time.

Every product choice connects back to the engagement problem.

Footprint responds to the app's low perceived value by creating an in-app experience that is lightweight, repeatable, and specific to student life at St. George.

My contribution was the project framing as much as the interface.

As project lead, I helped move the team from a broad app-usage problem toward a clear product story: students needed a reason to care, not just another way to find links.

The next step would be testing the return loop with students.

I would test whether students understand Footprint in the first few seconds, whether quests feel motivating without feeling childish, whether memory saving belongs inside a university app, and whether stamps are enough to create repeat visits.

The main lesson was that engagement is not only about adding more features. The project became stronger when we stopped asking what utility students needed and started asking what would make the app worth opening.