An application for the modern student.

Higher education information systems are archaic. Intrsect streamlines all of the information you need.

ROLE

Product Design, User Growth

SKILL SET

UI/UX DESIGN, Higher Education Sales, Trolling YikYak for user growth

Tools

Adobe Creative Suite, Sketch

TIMELINE

Spring 2016-2018

tl;dr

We built Intrsect to solve our own problems as students.

During our senior year, as grades started to seem less relevant, Bjorn Ordoubadian and I set off to try and build a solution that would make it much easier to access the daily information we needed as students.

We shipped Intrsect with $100 in 3 weeks and captured 82% of our user base.

With a few custom RSS scrapers, a single-page mosaic layout, and a direct link to order Dominos to your dorm room, we started building Intrsect with the hope of changing how students planned and navigated their daily experience. After 3 weeks of iterating and the $100 Apple developer fee, we launched Intrsect. Within the first week, we signed up 82% of Davidson students.

We became the first student team to receive investment funding from Davidson College.

For fun, we decided to pitch in the College's venture competition and we won.

6 years later, Intrsect is still being used by Davidson students.

To date, Intrsect has generated 6,000+ downloads, 135,000+ sessions, and $58,200 in profit. More important, Davidson students are still using Intrsect today to get the information they need.

jump to:
Problem

What's for lunch?

I graduated from Davidson College in 2016. At the time, the information architecture seemed like it hadn't been updated since Woodrow Wilson attended, and rumor has it that despite how much Steph Curry loved Commons, he left Davidson early because of how hard it was to figure out what was for lunch everyday. Beyond food menus, learning about what was happening on campus, what number to call if you were locked out, or even which laundry machines were available, was a disaster.

This was all happening at the time when the modern student's standard for a seamless user-experience was set by the decade-defining social apps that were gaining foothold in our daily experiences. So why then hadn't there been any innovation within the systems Davidson students looked to on a daily basis.

During our senior year, as grades started to seem less relevant, Bjorn Ordoubadian and I set off to try and build a better solution that could live on at Davidson once we left.

Process

Let's streamline

We knew that Davidson students needed a lot of information from the College to go about their ordinary days. What's for lunch? When does that office open? Which laundry machines are available? And we knew that accessing that information was really inefficient.

But we didn't know how inefficient until we mapped the whole ecosystem. Outdated websites, hidden-PDFs, applications not optimized for mobile—it was a mess! We realized that not only was information incredibly fragmented, but there were several services that were underutilized by students simply because they didn't know they existed. That's wasted tuition dollars.

Our goal was simple: take all of the information a Davidson student needs on a daily basis, and streamline it into one interface that meets a modern student's expectations for how easy it should be to access information.

Fancy duct-tape should do the trick.

We weren't brave enough to take on rebuilding the College's decade-old infrastructure. Rather, Intrsect could serve as the aggregator that duct-taped together all of the relevant information that students need, and serve it in an easy-to-use, modern interface. Our thinking—just some fancy duct tape could do the trick.

With a few custom RSS scrapers, a single-page mosaic layout, and a direct link to order Dominos to your dorm room, we started building Intrsect with the hope of changing how students planned and navigated their daily experience.

Considerations

A modern design that students understood.

As students, we knew that the end user wanted an interface that was simple, modern, and intuitive.

One picture for your day

Given the existing solutions took students across multiple websites, the primary goal with Intrsect was to condense all of the information a student needed in one view.

Relevant, up-to-date information

As soon as information was published, it was immediately available via Intrsect. This met the student demand for real-time information on the go.

Safe and secure

Intrsect didn't collect any personal information whatsoever, so students felt free to gather the information they needed securely.

LIFETIME TRACTION

With 3 weeks and $100, we built & launched Intrsect. We captured 82% of the student body within a week.

6,021

DOWNLOADS

135,590

TOTAL SESSIONS

58,200

TOTAL REVENUE($)

Intrsect Davidson, built by Bjorn Ordoubadian & Shea Parikh, becomes first student team in history to receive investment from Davidson College's Board of Trustees.

March 11, 2016 c

An app built by students, for students, loved by students.

uNREAL

This app is the bacon of the Davidson BLT. It's the bees pajamas. If I were to nominate an app for the Nobel peace prize, it would be this app. I would rather have this app than the unlimited ones at Applebee's. Yooge.

Mr. Modus Ponens
02/21/2016
iNSANELY HELPFUL

This app consolidates all the things I routinely Google search for into one sleek, accessible page. The times things are open, commons menu, and activities page are so helpful. Thanks, and I will be recommending this to everyone.

Frog 5
02/18/2016
Comprehensive & easy to use

Great for students or visitors. Incredibly easy access to hours, menus, and websites of local eateries. Good collection of commonly used links. Makes it simple to keep up with the buzz around campus.

Math Star
02/23/2016
keeps me connected

Also a great app for alums to stay connected with Davidson.

Martin Luther
Product Designer at Uber.INC
Davidson Alumnus
02/22/2016
Soooo helpful

The only thing that could make it better would be if it had information about the open hours of each gym/pool.

Martin Luther
Product Designer at Uber.INC
Martin Luther
Product Designer at Uber.INC
nicejacksons
09/06/2016
Martin Luther
Product Designer at Uber.INC
Martin Luther
Product Designer at Uber.INC
4.9/5
On the iOS App Store
4.8/5
On the Android Play Store.

Working with Shea has been incredibly rewarding. He was able to quickly adapt and solve new challenges we faced as a start-up within domains where I had no expertise and was of little help. We complemented each other very well with our skillsets, and Shea's willingness to learn how to do what was needed contributed greatly to our overall success.

Bjorn Ordoubadian
Co-Founder, Intrsect

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