IWD: the mobile app welcoming international students

ISU (International Students Union) is an organization dedicated to providing support to international students in Italy. Through reception, orientation and counseling services, ISU facilitates the integration of students in Italian universities. ISU commissioned IWD (International Welcome Desk), a digital platform designed to centralize requests related to bureaucratic and academic procedures.

International students had to be able to request the services they need from a single app, from residence permits to Erasmus, from internships to administrative support, with shorter waits and a direct channel to ISU and the universities.

The students who use IWD speak different languages and come from different cultures, so we aimed for a clear, readable interface. Service requests are split into guided steps, so students can complete each procedure without mistakes. During development we ran several rounds of testing with real students and used their feedback to refine the interface, starting from the first login.

Students use the Flutter app: from their phone they receive notifications, follow their requests and message their contact persons. They sign in with their institutional credentials through a Single Sign-On written in Go, the same one used by UniCandidate, the university application platform we also built for ISU.

Behind the app is the backend we developed in Ruby on Rails, with the data stored in PostgreSQL. IWD operators work from a web interface built with Bootstrap.