The Project
For the final project in UTS Application Development in the iOS Environment, I worked in a team to use the iOS development skills learnt throughout the subject to build a mobile app that solves a real world problem.
Assignment Brief:
You will create an application that solves a real-world problem for a fictional user persona.
You will follow an iterative product design cycle to produce a minimum viable product.
On the final day of class you will demonstrate the product to fictional investors in a presentation.
A common complaint among UTS students is how poor the mobile app was in terms of user experience and general performance. IT students who go digging may find that the app itself is simply just a webview pointing to a range of other webpages built using campusM. While this solution is easy for universities to maintain without hiring developers it provides a poor experience for students with limited functionality, lots of bugs and a generic interface.
We discovered that a redesigned, native mobile app for students would greatly improve the student experience by giving them fast and easy access to all the essential services and information on the go. Some benefits of a native solution include performance, security and extended functionality through native module support. Developing a first-party app would allow for a more customisable design to align with other UTS platforms, and also allow for integration with more systems that are not compatible with the current solution.
Over the course of a few weeks, our team used Swift and Xcode to develop a prototype of the app for iOS devices and then pitched the app to our peers. Throughout this process we learnt about human-centred design, mobile development, APIs, dependencies, version control and testing.
See our presentation and some mockups of the app:
