Penn Labs recently released new features on Penn Mobile and Penn Course Plan to respond to student needs.
Penn Labs is a group of student engineers, developers, and designers that create products to improve student life. The newly launched features allow for monitoring of fitness areas, schedule sharing with friends, and student polling.
Teams within Penn Labs currently maintain six major products — Penn Course Review, Penn Course Plan, Penn Course Alert, Office Hours Queue, Penn Clubs, and Penn Mobile. College senior Kepler Boonstra, one of the co-directors of Penn Labs, described the idea-generation process as entirely student-driven.
“I don’t really enforce anything at all,” Boonstra said. “Everyone at Penn Labs is really self-motivated.”
After noticing the convenience of laundry monitoring on Penn Mobile, Penn Labs members decided to implement a similar feature for fitness. Students can now check the capacity and popular hours of various areas within Pottruck Health and Fitness Center.
After waiting around six months to receive data from the University, the team was able to implement the new feature after only a few months on the developing end, according to Boonstra.
An update to Penn Course Plan allows students to share their schedules with each other. Boonstra said that the new feature has advantages beyond simply viewing a friend’s schedule. For example, he recalled that the captain of the gymnastics team was able to coordinate practice times by looking at her teammates' schedules.
Another new addition is the Penn Polls feature on Penn Mobile. Student groups can submit polls to gain “user research” as a way to garner feedback on all aspects of the University.
“The aim is to connect everybody and make them feel integrated and that their opinions matter,” Boonstra said. “Eventually, we’re hoping to collaborate more with administration so that there’s tangible effects from this.”
Through the use of Google Analytics, Boonstra observed that Penn Labs had around 8,000 users in the last month and averaged about 16,000 users per year. According to Boonstra, these numbers represent the upper 90th percentile of the student body, indicating the popularity and practicality of Penn Labs’ offerings.
“I think it’s really awesome that almost everyone has heard of these tools that we work on, and that’s a kind of personal impact level that I get to see on my day to day,” Boonstra said.
Several members of the Penn Labs team double as teaching assistants for computer science classes, underscoring their role as both users and creators of the products.
Temporary disruptions to the Office Hours Queue website would also affect club members, providing an additional incentive for ensuring the reliability and effectiveness of their creations.
The idea of feedback is also important to the Penn Labs team. Every product contains its own feedback form for student requests. Based on the popularity of demand, Penn Labs will often work to implement what students are most interested in.
“The tagline is ‘for students, by students,’ and I think the ‘by students’ aspect is really important,” Boonstra said. “We are a part of the Penn community, part of the users of the products ourselves, and I think that’s what makes us really special. There are only a few organizations that have a stake in what they are creating every day.”
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