University of Salford

StoryCom

Evaluate

With only 3 weeks and minimum budget, the University of Salford needed a system that would allow attendees of the CBBC Summer Social event to turn smartphone photos into a comic strip record of their visit. They also wanted the ability to review, tag and report on the comic strips created at the event.

Design

Working closely with the university, we designed a mobile app for Android and iOS and proposed a cloud-based administration system that could be used to review, tag and report on created comic strips.

This design focussed heavily on user experience within the mobile app, ensuring that it would not only function as desired, but would be intuitive for first time users including children at the CBBC Summer Social event.

For the administration system, our design concentrated on ease of use by the university staff to manage events and conduct reporting and analysis on the comic strips.

Develop

Using the SeriouslyRAD® framework we quickly built the components of the system. The flexibility of the framework allowed us to easily and efficiently develop both the mobile app and the administration system.

We combined the existing user management, file storage and encryption features of the framework with a custom component that rendered the photos into a comic strip.

Finally, even with such a short time-frame for the project, we performed testing across multiple devices to ensure that there wouldn't be any problems at the first event.

Implement

With the first event involving CBBC fast approaching we offered to provide the hosting and installation of the system ourselves, to save the university time provisioning resources for the job. On the day of the event we were on site to ensure everything went smoothly.

Monitor

After the first event with CBBC, university staff were able to use the reporting we'd provided in the administration system to conduct their post-event analysis.