Bachelors Thesis – Lifeguard Examination App Design

Team Size: 1 (me)

Type of Project: UI Design / UX Research for Education

Timeline: 8 months (Final Year of Bachelors thesis)

As part of my Final Year Project I created an Android application that could be used during the Pool Lifeguard Exams. The application can be used by the examiners for marking the students, and the participants can review life-saving techniques.

The key benefit from the design and development of this application would be the digitalisation of the laborious and inefficient manual examination process. Calculations and filtering help to expedite the process and with the addition of features like the double stopwatch, additional user benefit is added.

The following screenshots show the key screens and functionality of the application.

Approach:

Twice During development I involved close friends, colleagues and family in the testing of the application. I conducted several guided user tests to validate the user flow and usability of the interface.

The Android application was coded within the Eclipse IDE using the Java and XML programming languages. A MySQL database was created and separate PHP files allowed the database to communicate with the Android application. The information read by the Android application was parsed as JSON.

Final Notes:

I like to think that I made this project through the process of “patchwork programming” (or to a certain extent agile development). By following tutorials and videos I was able to build my very first *proper* Android application. The two most useful were MyBringBack and AndroidHive.

StackOverflow was also a very useful resource.