NSW Education

The NSW Department of Education is the largest provider of public education in Australia, with the responsibility of delivering high-quality public education. NSW Education needed a new innovative way for students to fill out their plan and records of their vocational training activities. As they were currently doing this using pen and paper, EB Pearls developed an app solution.

Industry: Government

Project type: Mobile App

Our Role in the project

User experience

Research
UI/UX Audit
Stakeholders workshop
Product strategy
Rapid prototyping

UI Design

Visual design
Mobile app design
User engagement testing

Development

iOS app development
Android app development

Quality assurance

User testing
Unit test
Regression test
Test cases & execution

Technology Used

Swift

Kotlin

Firebase

Postman

Project Overview

Industry Engagement Diary is an iOS and Android mobile application that allows students to keep track of their completed hours for their vocational placements. It offers an easy way for teachers to gather the required information from students efficiently and conveniently. The app is definitely an improvement over the archaic form submission system, as it is more reliable, accurate and intuitive to use.

User Problems

The students and teachers were using pen and paper to fill out their plan and implementation of their vocational training activities. This was tedious to manage, especially for the teachers who had to manage and maintain all the data.

Business Problems

Teachers and students were sending all of their data to the department it was being stored. However, there was lack of analysis or continuous improvement of processes based on the data, due to it being very manual and hard to look back on.

Process

Backlog Creation

During the project, the product owner had the task of creating, maintaining, and prioritizing the product backlog. After that, the team determined which tasks to complete during a sprint. While moving the product backlog to scrum backlog, the team members expanded each item to more than one sprint tasks so that they could effectively share their work during each sprint.

Backlog Grooming

Backlog prioritisations, as well as modification sessions, were done to minimize ambiguity and maximize clarity. This helped the team understand the upcoming tasks in the backlog. The grooming sessions also allowed time for re-examining user stories based on new information.

Project Achievements

Evidence of Industry Engagement: The main purpose of this app is to provide students an easy way to provide a log of their vocational training hours and evidence, in the form of a placement report. The app also serves as a one-shop-stop for pertinent information such as, events, resources and industry contacts.
Report Submission: As part of the process, it was also required that students submit a comprehensive report. To facilitate this, the app had functionalities to allow the upload of files, the saving and resuming of form submissions, and a clear, broken-down process.

Retrospective

Learning

One of the major things we took away from working on this project was how to work effectively with a large government client. This experience has helped us better manage projects with clients from large organisations.

Next Steps

After the website is developed, we regularly communicate with the clients and we are always available for future maintenance and are committed to ongoing support. Moreover, we are monitoring the features that have been released.