The Strickhof for your pocket

Strickhof is Zurich’s competence center for agriculture, food and home economics. With three locations and numerous study and course offerings, it comprises various interdisciplinary basic and further training courses, a test farm and an information platform on all aspects of agriculture.

This wide range of offerings ensures that the Strickhof app is used by different target groups. The collaboration between us and the Strickhof team therefore began with a multi-part series of workshops. This resulted in a detailed concept for an app that meets the needs of the different target groups. Personas also does justice to it. We used our user-centered approach of collaborative UX design.

The result is a customizable app that – tailored to the user – covers a wide range of requirements. From the menu plan on campus, to a collection of publications, the complete calendar of events and campus navigation: the app is a practical helper in everyday life at Strickhof.

However, the most ambitious feature is probably the chat function. In the forum, different users from various fields can discuss their interests and get in touch with a Strickhof expert. This expert then takes over the moderation of the respective thread and provides support with specialist knowledge directly on the interactive platform.

The Strickhof app is a so-called Progressive Web App (PWA). The PWA offers many advantages of a native app and combines them with the simplicity of a web app. It is also cheaper and faster to develop than native apps, for example. Administration is also less complicated for administrators.

Due to the fact that Strickhof already had a large part of the necessary information available on a web-based basis thanks to its existing content management system, we were able to use this information directly for the PWA. For a native app, for example, this information would have had to be processed again, which would have resulted in correspondingly higher costs.

We were also able to draw on existing features. Our award-winning app LIstory We used this as a template for the integrated tour guide. This prior knowledge helped to save costs for Strickhof.

The Strickhof app is available in the App Store and on Google Play and we look forward to developing this project further together with Strickhof. Further features are already being considered, which we are working on and implementing – always with the users in mind.