It took one suggestion from a former student senate president for the university to launch its BeConnected app as a “one-stop shop” for students.
After introducing it to students in January 2025, the BeConnected team continued to change the app as it was in use. Digital innovation team member Jordan Lawrence noted their intention to keep improving.
“As BeConnected continues to grow, the goal is to make it a center for students, faculty and staff to access Bradley University resources and information,” Lawrence explained.
The app has been on a long journey, with new updates still underway. Each change aims to make information accessible to groups that need it most.
“We have designed a specialized dashboard for incoming freshmen and transfer students,” Lawrence added. “This supports our broader ‘front door’ goal: helping students understand what to do next, where to go and how to get help – especially between submitting their deposit and settling into their first weeks at Bradley.”
Transfer student Nathan Butterfield, a junior graphic design and UX major, has already seen the changes, but says not everything was necessary.
“I have it on my phone. I get the push notifications, but I don’t use it very often,” Butterfield said. “I just don’t have a reason to. It’s nice to use it to see things going on around campus, but outside of that, not so much.”
,Students like senior history and art history major Emily Crank have found more substantial uses for the updated app, using it to find internships and other resources.
Still, despite the various uses students have found for the app, one problem remains.
They forget it exists.
“I just don’t think of it always. It’s been a long time,” Crank noted.
To the development team at BeConnected, this isn’t a surprise. In fact, it’s a challenge they’re actively planning around.
”Adoption takes time,” Lawrence explained. “Students already have familiar ways of accessing their tools, so BeConnected needs to demonstrate practical value in their daily routines.”
The value the team is currently focused on is the communities students can find on campus.
“BeConnected ‘Communities’ is the fastest-growing feature on the platform,” Lawrence highlighted. “There are currently 37 existing communities, which are expected to increase as student organizations migrate from Presence/BeInvolved.”
Communities is a feature that provides a space for users to learn about events, communicate with members and have shortcuts to resources.
With this influx of adaptations and new features like ‘Communities’ in mind, one concern to look out for is the risk of overwhelming users.
“It could benefit if there were options to pick preferences for what you want to see,” Dylan Webb, a junior game design major, said. “Because if we’re seeing everything at once, that will be too much.”
While the dashboard default includes many features that not every student needs, the option to take them off exists. For many students discovering the site, however, that easily gets lost.
As the app continues to evolve and student feedback grows, Lawrence encourages input.
“If something is difficult to find, unclear or missing, we encourage them to use the feedback form on the platform to report issues and feature requests directly to our team.”
