UNC-Chapel Hill’s redesigned Hello Heels campus app is seeing surging usage, new student-friendly features, and a playbook other universities can copy in 2026.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Jan. 15, 2026 — Colleges have spent years telling students where to find information: check your email, visit the website, download the portal, follow the social accounts. Students, meanwhile, have made their preferences clear—if it isn’t easy to access on a phone in the moment they need it, it might as well not exist.
This week’s most telling case study comes from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where a student-guided overhaul of the Hello Heels app appears to have transformed a little-used tool into a high-traffic, day-to-day campus utility. Usage surged to about 37,000 weekly users generating around 90,000 page views per week, compared with roughly 6,000 weekly users and 10,000 weekly page views before the redesign, according to reporting on the app’s performance and relaunch strategy. (Inside Higher Ed)
The big shift: From “campus app” to “campus remote control”
A campus app succeeds when it becomes a shortcut to the handful of things students do constantly—checking what’s open, figuring out where to go next, and staying ahead of what’s changing in real time.
UNC’s own Student Affairs team highlighted this “everyday usefulness” approach in a Jan. 14 campus post that reads like a student’s daily checklist. Among the featured tools:
- Mobile food ordering tied to dining services
- Opt-in message channels for real-time updates (including “where to find free food”)
- Canvas connection so students can see course locations, meeting times, assignments, and instructor communications
- Real-time bus info via Chapel Hill Transit
- Digital One Card integration
- A customizable homepage (“quick links”)
- Health and well-being tools like the recreation center crowd meter, plus access to counseling resources
- The Heel Life calendar for student organizations and events (UNC Chapel Hill)
These aren’t flashy features. They’re friction removers—tools designed for the moments students actually reach for their phone.
Why it worked: Students didn’t just “test” it — they shaped it
Plenty of campus tech launches with a “student feedback” line in the press release. What stands out in UNC’s story is that the redesign was framed as student-guided, and adoption improved when the app became more aligned with student behavior and expectations. (Inside Higher Ed)
That’s also consistent with how the app is positioned in UNC’s own ecosystem: Hello Heels is the successor to CarolinaGO, presented as an all-in-one hub for maps, bus tracking, dining info, One Card access, campus resources, and more—designed to cut down the scavenger hunt across multiple sites and tools. (UNC Student Affairs)
In practical terms, this kind of redesign tends to succeed when the team building it stops asking, “What information do we want students to see?” and starts asking, “What problems are students trying to solve at 8:55 a.m. when class starts at 9?”
Personalization without notification overload: The “opt-in” model
One of the hardest problems in campus communications is that the “right” message is rarely right for everyone.
UNC’s approach leans heavily on opt-in channels, allowing students to subscribe to specific topics and receive timely alerts without turning the app into a constant stream of irrelevant pings. UNC Student Affairs lists examples of channel topics that include campus advisories, financial well-being, mental health, and free food, among others. (UNC Student Affairs)
That distinction matters for two reasons:
- It respects attention. Students can choose the categories that fit their needs.
- It creates trust. When notifications are consistently relevant, students stop reflexively turning them off.
On the product side, the Android listing for Hello Heels also notes a newer capability: opt-in location-based notifications for alerts like safety updates, campus changes, and event reminders—while stating the feature is optional and that a user’s location is “never stored or shared.” (Google Play)
The unglamorous (but essential) part: Security, accessibility, and reliability
If a campus app is becoming a “front door,” it also becomes a higher-stakes platform: it must be accessible, secure, and dependable.
UNC’s IT organization has publicly described work supporting the overhaul and rebrand effort, including contributions from teams focused on digital accessibility and information security, along with infrastructure and application services support. (Information Technology Services)
That behind-the-scenes investment is often the difference between a campus app students try once and forget—and one that becomes part of their routine.
A 2026 reality check: Engagement is still a problem across higher ed
UNC’s story lands at a moment when student engagement remains a stubborn challenge. In a recent “stats for 2026” roundup, Inside Higher Ed cited data indicating 36% of students have not participated in extracurricular or co-curricular experiences, while 39% say they’re very involved in at least one activity. (Inside Higher Ed)
That split is crucial. It suggests a large segment of students either isn’t finding the right pathways into campus life—or is running into barriers like time, awareness, belonging, or cost.
A well-designed campus app can’t solve all of that. But it can remove a core obstacle: not knowing what’s available, what’s happening today, and where to start—especially for first-year students and transfer students trying to decode an unfamiliar system.
What’s “current” today, Jan. 15: The campus-app world is in maintenance mode too
While UNC’s engagement story is the headline case study in the student-success space this week, Jan. 15 also reflects a quieter truth about campus digital life: universities are continually updating and maintaining the systems students rely on.
For example, Georgetown’s student-facing system GU Experience posted a planned downtime window on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026 for maintenance. (Experience)
Carleton University similarly announced a Jan. 15 maintenance window with expected service impacts that included its Carleton Mobile App (while noting no impact to emergency notifications). (Carleton)
Those notices aren’t as shareable as an engagement success story—but they reinforce the same point: the student experience now runs through digital infrastructure, and reliability is part of retention.
A practical playbook for colleges considering a campus app redesign
UNC’s results will naturally raise the question: “Can our campus do this?”
Here’s a grounded checklist institutions can use—based on what UNC emphasized publicly and what tends to separate high-adoption campus tools from abandoned ones.
1) Build for the top 10 student tasks, not the org chart
UNC’s “top 10 tools” list is a useful template: dining, transit, class info, ID/payment access, health resources, and events are recurring needs. (UNC Chapel Hill)
2) Make personalization opt-in and obvious
Opt-in channels help keep notifications useful instead of noisy. (UNC Student Affairs)
3) Integrate what students already use daily
Canvas and digital ID/One Card integrations aren’t “nice-to-haves”—they’re what turns an app into a habit. (UNC Chapel Hill)
4) Treat privacy as part of engagement, not a legal checkbox
Hello Heels’ Google Play listing emphasizes data-safety practices and describes location-based notifications as optional. Whether or not students read policies, they respond to trust. (Google Play)
5) Design for accessibility from day one
UNC’s IT recap points to accessibility work being part of the effort, which is increasingly non-negotiable for student-facing services. (Information Technology Services)
6) Measure what matters—and iterate
The most compelling part of UNC’s story is that the redesign produced measurable results in weekly active users and page views. (Inside Higher Ed)
That kind of tracking turns “we think it’s working” into “we know what students actually use.”
Bottom line: A campus app is becoming the new student union
For years, “campus engagement” conversations focused on physical space: student centers, bulletin boards, dining halls, orientation tents. Those still matter. But in 2026, the digital layer often determines whether students even learn about those spaces—or feel supported enough to show up.
UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hello Heels redesign is a reminder that engagement doesn’t always require inventing new programs. Sometimes it’s about connecting students to what already exists—in the one place they reliably look: their phone. (Inside Higher Ed)
