COMMENTARY: Lost and losing time with Navigate, UHCL’s new app for students

This spring, UHCL rolled out a new app called Navigate by EAB, a tech company that caters to educational institutions. The app gives students weekly to-do lists of “important priorities,” helps them investigate majors and careers, and even connects them with advisers, tutors, and other campus resources to schedule appointments straight from their phones.

With cell phones glued to our hands, an app to help with college deadlines and scheduling sounds like a win-win for most students. The download was fast and free, so with an hour to spare, I took a quick tour of Navigate.

A search for the University of Houston quickly turns up the Clear Lake campus, and students are asked to log in with their campus username and password. Assuming one remembers these credentials, this should be fairly straightforward. Navigate greets first-time users with an absurdly long-winded Terms of Use agreement followed by a survey with questions about user employment, family history and career goals.

Finally, the home screen appears with five important “to-dos” for the week, an academic calendar alert, and a simple menu of colorful icons for things like Appointments, Holds, Class Schedule, My Major and Settings.

So what does Navigate have to add to my to-do list? The alert leads to a list of items with various due dates, one passed. This is alarming, but the listed items don’t seem too pressing. The first is, “Get your student ID,” due by Feb. 21, and it links to a helpful note about where and why to obtain one. This could be a useful reminder for new students, but this information is just as easily found on the school website.

Next on the list is to get my books and supplies. This one was due on Jan. 29, a full week after the first day of class, possibly to allow for late registration. The item simply expands to a spirited reminder that “Every class begins with a good book,” followed by a link to the campus bookstore website. Perhaps this could have been helpful if it listed the required books for each student in one place, eliminating course searches and syllabus digs, but Navigate is unimpressive thus far.

The next few items on the to-do list are seemingly random and even less helpful. “Find an on-campus job” could be useful for students actually looking for a job, but the link to campus job listings simply takes you to the EAB website homepage.

“Get to know your career portal” seems interesting; “an easy online system to find school year jobs, summer internships, and full-time positions close to graduation,” but the button for the portal also goes straight to EAB’s homepage. After a bit of digging, it appears only careers at EAB can be viewed through this link.

“Draft a cover letter” is the last alert on the to-do list, and it should “make an impression,” says Navigate. More pressing items are waiting on a real-world to-do list, and time is running short. However, knowing how to write a cover letter and having a basic draft with your resume is surely helpful for any student. The link beneath this item promises writing tips, but you can probably guess where it leads: the EAB homepage again. It’s becoming all too familiar.

With little time left and no to-dos worth doing, it seems like a good idea to skip forward to the calendar function. The calendar alert is to “apply for graduation on-time,” which unfortunately doesn’t have a subsequent page on how and where to do so. Navigate wants to add this to my iPhone’s calendar, a helpful function. However, a peek into my calendar shows events listed every day for the next three weeks, and each event simply says “academic calendar,” with no further clarification and no reminder to apply for graduation. Again, this function seems to be a waste of time. For those who use their phone calendar, doctors appointments and due dates would surely be lost in a sea of ambiguous gray dots.

A quick look at the “class schedule” icon yields more confusion. The “list view” shows this semester’s courses (one twice) and instructors, but not the days or times. The “schedule view” blocks off two online classes each day before 6 a.m., and the on-campus classes are nowhere to be found.

The appointment scheduling function could be a useful tool for many students. If you aren’t able to make a phone call at the time, a few clicks through the app can get it done before it slips your mind, so it seems worth a few more minutes of my time. The purple “Appointments” icon leads to a series of questions about what type of appointment you’d like to schedule, who you’d like to schedule it with, etc. It seems to know who my adviser is, which is helpful considering I was unaware until last semester. It lets students choose the day and shows available times to choose from, and yes, the office did receive my appointment. Since it was just a test, I logged back in to cancel and was kicked back out before it went through. The redundant log-in seems to be a consistent issue with Navigate, but the appointment scheduling is definitely a redeeming quality.

Lastly, the “my major” icon leads to an error page: “Uh oh.” We’re right back to where we started, prompted to search for a school. Would it be worth it to log back in? After spending over an hour fiddling with Navigate while my original, more pressing college to-do list sits stagnant, complete with chapters to read, quizzes and exams to take, and papers to write, it’s time to set the phone down.

There may be a learning curve to Navigate, a setting to keep you logged in, and a round-about way to access the promised “career panel,” cover letter tips, and campus job listings. Even with what little it offered on the first trial, it could be useful to a few extra-fresh faces or phone-call haters. Unfortunately, Navigate seems to be a waste of precious time for this college student.

UPDATE: 2/17/19 – In response to The Signal’s video featuring student feedback of the Navigate app, UHCL’s Director of Transfer Advising and Student Transitions and Navigate Application Administrator Kristi Rickman reached out to the EAB team regarding the issue of the Class Schedule feature not working. The issue has been resolved.