Summary
Civitas was born as the idea of giving power to the citizens to effectively communicate with the local goverment about what needs to be done and where. Providing all the necessary information, including geolocation, pictures and a description of what is wrong, it gives local authorities the chance to really take care of it’s peoples concerns and daily problems with the city.
My job was to create an app that had all the tools needed for this to happen, but flexible enough to every city make it their own. Wih their own branding, colours or even features if needed.
The project
In order to keep things simple, we decided that a really simple flow, with a focus on what single screen should be the best approach. This way every user will know exactly the exact amount of information that needs to be provided for the local goverment to take action.
With this in mind, we knew that a description, at least a picture and a location are the basic needs.
The most difficult part at that time, was to include several images at once. Smartphone internet speed were not that great, and their computing power was lacking as well. So we needed to take into account the very likely scenario were the uploading fails.
With this we create a queue that frees the user and tries to upload to our servers and waits for the confirmation. Once everything is in order, pictures are deleted to free the alredy limited disk space.
challenges
One of the biggest challenge was to really think ahead of time, and make the app as much flexible as possible. We did that relying on lots of references and configuration files, that allowed us to change colours, icons, images and texts in no time.
When new features came from specific clients, we delivered that feature on a separate module, and simply activate it through our configuration files. This way we can have multiple features active at once, or none at all.
Result
Our app, was really apreciated on local goverments, specially small ones that have remote areas or don’t have the fundings to really patrol every corner to keep everything running smoothly.
Here we can see an example of two very different towns using a flavor of our app.
Lessons learnt
The most important think we learned in this project is that thinking ahead and taking time to really consider how the app is going to be used, really paid off. For us made the difference and really helped us out.
The team
Developed at Technodac S.C.P., Tarragona.
- Product Owner – Carlos Cuenca
- UX Designer – Adrià Pérez Pla
- Android Developer – Eloi Navarro Serrano