ICT Broadcast

Undergraduate level college project

June 2017 - November 2017

2 members

Motivation

Motivation for this project came from the problems faced by me and my fellow classmates during our college. As a student you have to keep track of a lot of things, deadlines for assignments, changes in schedule, exam results, events happening in the campus etc. and the channel for notification for all these things were different, schedule changes and results were posted on notice board, assignments were posted on moodle, sometimes a change in deadline was notified through email or maybe a whatsapp message. Or maybe the same notice is posted everywhere but when it is changed sometimes the change is not done everywhere. This led to lot of confusion and unnecessary frustration.

ICT broadcast was designed to tackle these problems by offering a single platform to handle assignments, events and notices.

Research / Requirement Gathering

To understand the problems faced by our users, the students, we interviewed our classmates and friends to determine the most desired features in the application. We created an empathy map to understand the general pain points and needs of the user. We looked at various platforms like web, android, ios etc. and determined from our user base that an android app would be the best option since every student kept their phones on them all the time and majority of our users owned an android phone. Notifications sent on phone are mostly noticed immediately compared to checking notifications on a web platform.

The most common features that the users wanted were:

  • Immediate notification of any new notice/event posted
  • Immediate notification of any change to notice/event posted
  • Automatic recurring reminders for assignment deadlines
  • Ability to post questions on posted content

Design

Since the app would hold a lot of textual information compared to graphical information we decided that it would be best to go with a simple, clean design with light colors like white and sky blue, and simple sans-serif font to avoid any visual clutter and to give the app a relaxed feel.

Development and Testing

Unfortunately, due to our lack of experience in Android development and user research methods, we could not complete the app on time with all the features that we had planned to include. However, we were able to develop a few basic features and got reviews for them by our peers and professors.

Future Enhancements and Learning

I learned a lot about user experience design and android app development through this project, by practicing the concepts and analyzing the results. Even through failing to complete development I learned how to plan for projects efficiently so that atleast a minimum viable product could be created.