Reaction All Years

Project Description:

Have you ever wanted to request a song at an event/bar/restaurant but eventually gave up because the queue for that is too long? We created a solution to that problem.
SHINE Karaoke app is a modern karaoke system to facilitate song requests to provide a better experience from DJ services at a bar or an event. As a participant in a karaoke event, we wanted to overcome the struggles of pen and paper song requests and incorporate our knowledge of web design and computer software to provide a product that helps the user and host in a karaoke event.
Our client, the owner of Shine Karaoke, provides us with information for the development of the Shine Karaoke App for iPhones and Android phones to let her clients efficiently search for a song and place that song on a request to the karaoke queue. She owns the Shine Karaoke + DJ Services in Ottawa which was founded in 2019. Her company offers karaoke and DJ services in a bar setting or at exclusive events. The company also offers virtual parties with host-led games and supports fundraising events like the Dance-a-thons. Leanne Seaward, one of the supervising professors for this project, is providing Agile Methodology and strategies for every step of the project development. Laura McHugh, another supervising professor, is helping with the technical writing portion of the project to help provide a clear and structured report for the readers.
This Project took us about six months from start to finish. We started by learning new programming languages and getting familiar with developing tools that are necessary for our web and app development in the first half and gathered sufficient information to start building the project in the second half. During the last six months, we put in efforts and commitments towards our project and gained a lot of knowledge of how to develop a cross-platform mobile application and a website.
In conclusion, the Shine karaoke app and web application successfully meet all its proposed and designed goals by allowing shine karaoke customers to send their song requests to the host without going through its actual songbook and to automatically generate a queue that allows the DJ to view the song requests order on a real-time perspective. The team successfully implemented and tested the main functionalities of the app which are searching, filtering through genres, languages, duet songs, and sending a song request to the host. The web application’s song queue has successfully established the connection to receive requests from each user while the song queue is automatically built up in this process in a first-in-first-out (FIFO) manner. Both applications are guaranteed to have a minimalist design and a friendly app that are suitable to all users. Our team also completed a series of tests on several users to have an efficient and accurate app user experience.

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Project Description:

The relationship an organization has with its clients/ customers plays an important role in terms of building a successful business. It all makes sense because strong customer relationship maintained would yield repeating customers in a business and improved word of mouth referrals.
The Quad CRM is a web-based application designed to be used by organizations to manage the interactions they have with their customers / consumers. Our client is a Program Director at Grandview consulting and Solva Senior Living, a good description for the position would entail an individual equipped with the responsibility of filling the occupancies of senior living residential buildings. The Quad CRM is intended to be used by our client and other colleagues to keep in contact with current and potential customers and manage their interactions to ensure an overall positive customer experience which in turn would lead to an increased number of sales, better customer service and a higher level of productivity.
The need for a CRM software that also acts as a property manager is in high demand as there are not a lot of them currently up and running in the industry. This was no surprise that our client wanted the exact same thing. We had the task of remodeling the existing CRM system to have a property management feature added to it, also the current system had to be re-designed to have a simpler look and feel for easier navigation of the application.
The best option in this case in terms of picking a platform was Laravel, a free and open- source PHP web framework that contains expressive and elegant syntax. This framework has a simple look in terms of user interface and that was one of the main goals of the project. Additionally, the framework handles both the part the users see (user interface) and the part the users don’t see (back end/ logic) when combined with Jetstream which is an extension that can be added to the Laravel framework.
Working on this project was an amazing experience, Both technical and other wise. We got a good understanding of what an agile environment should be and tried to replicate it while working as a team to complete the project.

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Project Description:

Riverwood Acoustics of Renfrew, Ontario manufactures beautifully handcrafted speakers out of dense birch wood found and recovered from the bottom of the Ottawa River. The wood used is a result of the logging boom in the 1800s in Ottawa, where the river was used as a natural way to transport logs. However, some logs were too dense and sank to the bottom of the river, only to be reclaimed over one hundred years later to be crafted into elegant speakers. This well preserved and solid wood not only looks great but actually favours a fuller and richer sound compared to other materials when making speakers.

With a high quality product, our client Ben Seaman of Riverwood acoustics wanted a mobile application to compliment their premium speakers. This application is to control the and tune the equalizer of the speaker to the user’s preference. The software is mainly targeted for use with Riverwood Acoustics wireless Bluetooth model named “The Hudson” but is compatible with any Bluetooth speaker on the market.

The application has many features that Riverwood Acoustics customers can use. Using the sliders across the different frequency bands, the user can manually adjust the equalizer of their speaker. For ease of usability, there are a few automatic features that are designed to improve the sound quality of the speaker with minimal intervention. The automatic genre detection feature detects what type of music is playing and adjusts the EQ accordingly using preset EQ pattern profiles. Finally, the auto-calibration tool takes a recording of white noise output from the speaker and adjusts the equalization according to what room the speaker resides in and how sounds bounces off the speaker’s surroundings.

In accordance to the client’s needs, the application designed was developed cross-platform on both Android and iOS, the application was developed using the Xamarin Forms framework using the C# language. This allowed for development on both platforms while only needing to write a majority of the code once. As this was the entire team’s first time developing a mobile application, everyone was able to learn a substantial amount about mobile application development.

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Project Description:

Our client Kealy Mann who is a naturopathic doctor. In the naturopathic community, practitioners must maintain their licenses to practice certain treatments. The problem is no website exists for the naturopathic community to find any educational content. It’s difficult for them to find new content to maintain and acquire new licenses. This ND Academy website offers a hub for both practitioners and educational companies to find each other and acquire the services they need.
The benefit of this project is for practitioners like our client to be able to find their resources and be more aware of what’s available to them, removing much of the tedious process of searching the web for exactly what you are interested in or what you were looking for. The project aims to remove the isolation practitioners and others alike in the field in hopes of connecting them together. This project has a chance to benefit and profit many in the future, it gives sponsors, companies, and industries alike to be able to be more known and out there in the world then what they possibly were before generating more income and helping people to find what they need/want across multiple platforms.

We’ve learned many things from this development process, primarily since our front-end technology, React-Native, and our back-end technology, Node.js, are completely new to us. Some requirements of the project proved difficult to accomplish. Technical difficulties implementing a payment system as well as some other functionality has proven to be a much more precise task that requires more research

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Project Description:

We began working on our project with Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), when they reached out to us and explained the crisis that their Client Service Centre (CSC) are going through. They are facing a huge backlog at every channel of communication which hinders their normal operations and creates a bad experience for their clients. They wanted to understand why people feel the need to call and how they might reduce the backlog. Our team was responsible for the Study Permit line of business, which felt familiar as most of us made that journey only last year.
In the year 2021, Canada welcomed 450,000 new international students. They set a new record for the education industry in Canada and these numbers looked positive from afar. However, many international students have had their own struggles and a long journey to get here.
In the first phase, we set out to understand these journeys and collect as much information through secondary research. Applying a human-centred approach, we created and circulated questionnaires to gather key insights about their pain points and invited these participants for a semi-structured interview where they can share their personal stories and experiences. We also reached out to several Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to understand the challenges they tackle with their student clientele and what may make this easier for them.
In every part of our journey, we discovered that a major pain point for our applicants was the waiting time and lack of updates throughout their process. They wanted some sense of reassurance and wanted to feel the sense of human touch. We included various multimedia items to our solution to solve this problem. Videos, personalized tools, descriptive text material could not only help in assuring them but coming from a legitimate source will also help in tackling the problem of false information and the subsequent false alarms.
After gathering the qualitative and quantitative data, we analyzed it to present our research findings. Next, we used user experience strategies to form experience principles to guide our design intervention. We concluded that the solution should be user-friendly, support proactive communication, and provide relevant information to the applicants before they feel the need to call. This will empower the applicants and at the same time help in reducing the call loads on IRCC call centers.
Our design intervention includes a tool in the main IRCC site to provide the applicants (or potential applicants) a personalized set of resources of information in different formats, according to their specific situation: location, nationality, stage of the process, waiting time (if waiting), particular concerns or needs, etc. Student applicants tend to use the internet and search engines as a major source of information. This tool can enhance their research at each stage of their application process.
Furthermore, we use personalized emails and text messages to deliver follow-up information to our targeted users. This will give them reassurance throughout their waiting period and will further help in reducing their anxiety and uncertainty.
Our solution will help study permit applicants to get the information they need and wherever they need it. It will also empower applicants and at the same time help in reducing the call load from IRCC call centers.

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