Inspiration As UC Irvine students, we understand how complex and large our campus is when unfamiliar. Especially when needing to use the restroom, time is often of the essence, and searching for a long time may not be possible. Whether needing to use it before a test, having an emergency, or just needing to wash hands in general, we wanted to develop a way to conveniently and efficiently find nearby bathrooms on campus.
What it does Our application takes the user's current location and shows all the bathrooms they may utilize on a digital map. Each bathroom has a location and image associated to give a physical view and representation to improve the user experience. Users can zoom and move around on the map for an interactive experience.
How we built it Our project involves a Swift-developed application in addition to a supplementary website created using React to provide additional information and details. This integrates MapKit and CoreLocation to add location-based features to improve the personalized user experience. Using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, this website includes descriptions of the features of the application, additional background, and an overview of the development team. Its responsive design allowed for many adapting changes to improve our result over time.
Challenges we ran into In creating the website from scratch, our team has little to no knowledge of web development previous to the creation of this project. React was learned very quickly, and many issues arose due to inexperience that needed fast solutions to progress with the project. In terms of the application, Swift is a very complex app developer that needed an immense amount of learning and studying to create a functional interface and design. Again here, countless bugs were fixed and overcome due to how new these frameworks are in the technical space.
Accomplishments that we're proud of We are most proud of collaborating effectively to develop a full project that utilizes many new frameworks and development tools that we had little to no experience with before. We worked together efficiently to integrate a wide variety of features, both through a website and mobile application. The amount of knowledge and experience we gained in a short period was invaluable and extremely helpful for future projects and development ideas. Overcoming the many technical issues built our strength and comfort using these languages and frameworks to make use stronger moving forward.
What we learned On a technical side, our team learned an immense amount of information in developing new tools and methods. We developed skills quickly such as web development using React and Javascript as well as Swift application building that integrated modern frameworks. Basing our development on user-centric design gave us practical knowledge for future projects both in and out of the classroom. Overall, we all developed better collaboration and project management skills, as well as wide-ranging technical ability.
What's next for UCI Lavatory Locator Our team is moving forward in creating projects that help students of our community and build more practical applications to make differences that help people, whether big or small. Starting with just this school, we can progress forward in creating bigger and better projects in the future.