Over the past several years, mobile apps have become a central aspect of both pop culture and everyday life. Whether practical as a Google Maps or enjoyable as the app that makes lightsaber noises when you swing your phone, the mobile app has established itself as the newest big niche of software.
As the importance of these mobile apps increases, Northwestern certainly isn’t being left out of the loop. With access to specialty classes and dedicated faculty, Northwestern students of all disciplines are learning how to design and create the kinds of apps people download every day.
Human-Computer Interaction, a course in the McCormick School of Engineering, teaches students about the fundamentals of effective user interface for programs. The class, recently taught by professor Michael Horn, now has students form teams to design a Northwestern-relevant mobile web app. Apps designed in Horn’s class have included everything from a court reservation app for SPAC to what Horn calls a “digital version of bathroom graffiti” that utilizes QR codes in lieu of the traditional Sharpie. Anything that tackles a problem Northwestern students face is fair game.
The instruction in HCI includes workshops on web tools like HTML 5 and Javascript, but the main focus is on thinking like a user instead of just like a coder.
“These sort of students are going to go out into the world and be designing these things,” Horn said. “And so what I want them to get out of that is to have the experience, that perspective of the user.”
Student app development isn’t confined to the classroom, however. Northwestern’s Knight Lab, a collaboration between McCormick’s computer science department and the Medill School of Journalism, is an arena where faculty, grad students and undergrads can workshop journalism-centric mobile apps.
The lab was founded in 2010 following the debut of Narrative Science, a Northwestern-based research project that turned baseball box scores into organic-sounding recaps, according to Joe Germuska, the lab’s director of software engineering.
“It contributed to that idea that there was momentum and energy in continuing to push for the idea of the intersection of journalism and technology,” Germuska said.
For Shawn O’Banion, a third-year Computer Science PhD student, the Knight Lab is a great environment for journalists and programmers alike to develop app-building skills in a non-competitive setting.
“There’s tremendous opportunities for the collaboration of both disciplines,” O’Banion said. “They’re building these skill sets that are really required to build apps, and I think the University is such a unique place to work in compared to a business or corporation. You’re not necessarily driven by a profit or a bottom line, so you have more freedom to explore your ideas.”
With all these resources available at Northwestern, though, Germuska said the most important asset an aspiring app-builder needs is simply curiosity, and the University’s environment can help with the rest.
“It is so easy to bootstrap yourself these days,” Germuska said. “If you’re like, ‘Oh, how does that work? I want to know how that works,’ it’s really not that hard to find out, not just with the Internet but especially in a place with an environment like Northwestern with actual people who can answer your questions and encourage you when you get frustrated. They remind you that everybody started not knowing, and you just have to be willing to not be shy, not be nervous about not knowing things, and just go out and do it.”