City Solutions from our Mobile Development Students
The summer of 2017 the streets of Amsterdam faced a new problem inhibiting transportation; the overnight emergence of dock-less bicycle sharing. The mess of thousands of brightly branded bicycles dumped in the city were congesting bike racks and lanes and left dangling by canals, in private property, or the middle of the sidewalk.
Having witnessed this fledgling industry’s toll on visits to China, Labs Director Iskander Smit formulated the problem into a challenge pitched to the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences’ (AUAS) Autumn 2017 Mobile Development Minor. Their brief was to develop a mobile application using React Native that would enable users to notify bike share service providers of the location and issue for defect and misplaced bikes. The objective was to alleviate the new bike spam by incentivising users to notify service providers of defect bikes so they can be fetched or moved to avoid impoundment.
The students who took up this experimental challenge were an energetic and multinational team who showed up to the Labs with enthusiasm and curiosity. Info.nl tech lead Stefan Mirck and Labs Coordinator Ashlee Valdes, harnessed that energy while experimenting with new structures to enhance the experience for students and employees.
Over the following 20 weeks the team took the problem from concept to reality. Starting with a simple user flow sketch from Iskander, the coaches modeled the students in an Agile style. They received additional support through workshops including story mapping from UX designer, Myrte van Beemen and unit testing by Stefan. Their final in-house presentation and demo impressed info.nl employees with its usability and even gave a new perspective to a current solution in development by an info.nl team.
[ED-I1]I don’t really understand this sentence.
The team’s React Native web application for Android features location tagging through GPS, QR code identification and photo uploading through the camera, and part damage selection through a friendly bike icon graphical interface. Hosted on Firebase, the real time data entry triggers an instant ticket to the service provider’s dashboard. If a user is signed into the system, they would be eligible to receive an incentive by the service provider.
At the conclusion of their assignment, the students offered a tool to assist the city’s bike share problem. However, legislation outpaced them as the city had the bikes removed midway through the project. Despite this, the student’s work demonstrated the ability to quickly address a city issue through technology, using iterative sprints and a service-oriented framework.
