With AskBlaze tool, mobile team is
SPARKING INNOVATION
Partnerships
Kyle Taylor and Jonathan Sligh aren’t too far out of college themselves, so they have a pretty good idea of what college students want when it comes to technology. But they are also mobile developers, so they’ve been able to match student need with innovation to create unique tools for the UAB app — including AskBlaze, a chatbot expected to debut in 2019.
“The big thing in mobile development is giving customers information with the fewest clicks, giving them the easiest path possible,” Taylor said. “The chatbot is a UAB-branded search tool.” What is the deadline for admission to graduate school? Does UAB offer dental insurance? What time is kickoff Saturday?
The chatbot is designed to provide answers to frequently asked questions like these — so that students, faculty and staff can turn to the app without having to ask their professors or university offices for the information. That gives everyone more time to get back to the more important things they are doing to succeed in class and at work.
To help develop AskBlaze and other tools in the app, Taylor talked to students and used his own experience.
“I thought about all of the things that bothered me and that I wanted in college,” said the Auburn graduate.
The goal of AskBlaze, said Applications Architect Daniel Jones, is empowering students, faculty and staff to find information on their own, in a centralized place. And chatbots and artificial intelligence are trending, with 38 percent of enterprises actively planning to deploy AI tools.
“From an innovation standpoint, we’re creating a tool that combines multiple outlets for information,” said Jones, who supervises Taylor and Sligh. “Our team looks for ways to enhance overall customer experience through technology, by simplifying daily actions and making the experience more beneficial.”
The mobile team first developed a prototype, then partnered with core areas on campus to talk about the type of information that should be presented by AskBlaze.
“We did not want the chatbot to be an IT tool,” Jones said. “We built in a backend so that each area controls its own content. We’re empowering them to enter their own questions.”
Areas such as OneStop, Admissions, Athletics, University Relations and Financial Affairs, among others, will be able to create their own content for the AskBlaze tool.
Jones’ team is constantly partnering with academic and business units on ways to innovate student and staff experiences, from putting the UAB admissions application in a mobile format to automating the application for degree, a process that was previously done almost entirely on paper.
“There is a lot of innovation in UAB app itself,” Jones said. “We’ve tried to focus on action-oriented technology, not just linking out to other sites — we’re looking for things that drive people to the app. It’s not just a way to provide information but a way to enhance the day-to-day experience.”
One of the newest innovations is a series of student-related links that will replace the BlazerNET tile, a link which simply took students to the BlazerNET portal, which was not particularly mobile-friendly.
Outside of the app, Jones’ team is also working on attendance-based alerts for Canvas, so professors can set up automated alerts if a student misses a pre-determined number of classes, as well as the new advisor scheduling tool now in BlazerNET.
Jones’ penchant for thinking about the future and improving experiences even earned him the Staff Innovator of the Year Award at the 2018 UAB Innovation Breakfast sponsored by the Bill L. Harbert Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.