In association with the subject IN2000, Software Engineering we were
given five project case, my team and I choose the case about air
quality in large cities in Norway. Air quality and air pollution are
an often topic in Norwegian media, and we saw a need for information
about air quality and how air quality affects us. Caeli is an app that
is designed to allow users in an easy and fast way to see the air
quality in the desired geographical area in Norway in real time, as
well as for the previous and next 24 hours. In addition, users can
easily get information about health advice for different levels of
pollution and for different user groups. Caeli also allows users to
customize the application according to their own personal preferences
so that they can filter out information and services they may find
unnecessary or irrelevant. The name Caeli means "air" in Latin and
refers both to a vision of developing an application whose purpose is
to show the air quality and hopefully contribute to awareness of air
quality and how air pollution can affect own health and the
environment.
The application is developed in Android Studio with Kotlin as the
programming language. Displayed data uses an OkHttpClient that
retrieves real-time measurements from pollution measurement stations
in Norway that we get through the api.met.no. We present the
measurements against a desired geographical area that are taken from
the geographical name register Kartverket.no/data. The graphical user
interface of the application is styled with the Markup language XML.
Through the project we followed the agile framework Scrum, we used
Trello as backlog and Evetro during our retrospective meetings. My
role in the project was mainly as an interaction designer, the team
concluded that everyone should participate in all possible stages of
the process. During the twelve weeks project work I had the role as a
Scrum master and project owner several times, but most of my time was
spent designing the Application's activities in Kotlin and XML. I
worked with the main interaction activity that displays data on
specified locations, settings, notifications, health advice, and
general application design.
As an interaction designer, my work tasks were gaining insight and
collecting data from users. In collaboration with the other two
interaction designers, we collected data from different user groups
like; asthmatics, cyclists and general population using
semi-structured interviews. We design and held user tests iteratively
at new increments on our prototype, with the goal of uncovering the
needs of the users. This gave us the ability to design user stories,
identify functional and non-functional requirements, which led to a
good backlog for the development of the application. The project work
was very exciting and educational. I am left with an understanding of
the importance and process of using agile development methodology such
as the Scrum framework and the importance of a good group dynamics. It
was rewarding to try native development in Android studios with a
relatively new programming language like Kotlin.