Romplan UiB
Product design
An Android app I started in 2015 so we could quickly see whether a seminar room at the University of Bergen was free for studying. What began as a tool for ourselves grew to an estimated 100–150 users.
From a course exercise to an Android app
The starting point was a small Java desktop application another student had made for a mandatory course exercise. I rewrote the underlying parts and ported the idea to Android. At first I handled the design, front end and back end myself. A friend later joined the project and took responsibility for the back end.
Working with the university's room data
The application scraped room and schedule information from HTML pages in an older university web application. It cached the data on the device so people could return to the room overview without repeating the complete lookup each time.
Making time visible
The hardest part was the schedule view. Dates, local time and daylight-saving changes had to resolve correctly before the interface could place a class in the right part of the timetable. Getting both the time calculations and the visual rendering to agree required more work than the basic room lookup.
Use beyond our own needs
University IT technicians began using the app during their daily checks of equipment in teaching rooms. The timetable told them whether a class was in progress before they entered a room. Students also used it to find free seminar rooms for studying, which was the need that had started the project.
More use than we expected
I do not have an exact usage record, but I remember the app reaching roughly 100–150 users at its highest point. That was much more than we expected from a tool made to solve our own study-room problem. The project was also covered through an interview with the local student newspaper Studvest.
Initiated, designed and developed by Edvard Pires Bjørgen in 2015, with another student later taking responsibility for the back end. Based on an earlier mandatory course exercise created by a classmate.