App for communication and information sharing (I)

Abstract

For our final year project, we were tasked to design a cross-platform mobile application on behalf of Peace Baptist Church. The mobile application was built with the purpose of enabling information sharing and storage, facilitating real-time communication through a chat functionality and to ease the administrative workload of church staff. The task was presented to us with several key considerations. First, the application had to serve users not only in Singapore, but in China as well. This created the need to design our application’s architecture to be robust and resilient, to function reliably even under the influence of China’s Great Firewall. Next, a large proportion of users of the application would be advanced in age. To deliver a good user experience for them, significant design tweaks would have to be made to the user interface to increase accessibility. Lastly, users of the application would speak Mandarin as their first language. As such, support for Mandarin in our application had to be established to keep the user experience intuitive and smooth.

Before embarking on our project, we conducted research on best practices that could be applied in the following areas: general application development, implementing chat functionality, and designing applications tailored for elderly users. Insights attained were used to improve our development practices, enhance our system architecture, and to create a seamless user experience.

After careful considerations for our project, we eventually settled on using React Native on the Frontend, Spring Boot for the Backend, and MySQL as our database. Through the course of the project, we were successful in meeting most, if not all of the requirements outlined by our external stakeholder.