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Town-Guide Android Application

Student Name

Submission Date

Cover Letter

This project involved design and requirements gathering for an Android application called Town-guide application. The following is the list of people who engaged in the requirements gathering and the design study:

The Study Team Members

Study Objectives

The general objective of the study is to introduce a new android application for visitors at the end of next month to help lower their travelling costs by 50% and reduce the time for finding places and services to one minute. The project also aims to help visitors find category of services in a region by one click with details such as directions, ratings, costs and security. Through this study, the major deliverables are to gain understanding of the Town-guide system’s requirements and design through analysis of the market and the existing application in the same market.

Executive Summary

The Town-Guide Android app is intended to help users who are majorly visitors in a city to find locations, services and other products. The major objective of the project is to help people adopt to new places. Though there are various applications in the market with a near same purpose, the design and inclusion of features will allow the Town-Guide app have the desired breakthrough in the market. O understand the design and user requirements, it is essential to gather data on the available similar applications, their features and aspects that their users find challenging.

The study team will conduct a system analysis process where the mobile app developers will identify similar applications in the market. Specifically, the team will identify the application that help international visitors find their directions in the local places (Koutroumanis, 2011). The business analysist will identify all the business requirements of these systems and the way the requirements are implemented.

The analysis of the existing system will take one week where the analyst and the application developers will document the existing systems, issues in the current market and possible solutions or system alternatives that will solve the issues. This major method of analysis of the current system will be through peer reviews on the play store. The researchers will develop a list of questions that will help them go through the application reviews of existing customers. These questions and guidelines include the rating of the current applications, security challenges, application features, and application limitations, design of the application and ease-of-use of the application.

The recommendation of the system analysis is that the system is to integrate several functionalities from other system to enhance efficiency and solve the identified problems. The system is also to avoid complex designs in terms of user experience design because visitors need to arrive at the information they are looking for within a short time.

System Study

The system analysts and business requirement analyst used an action research methodology to arrive at the study recommendations, gather data and make conclusions. In this type of research, the study team engaged in the project by joining the other teams in the community to solve the problem that guests had. The methodology involve an iterative process that involve five major steps; planning, action, results and reflection. For every iteration, the team will plan, take action, obtain results and then reflect on the implementation of the iteration. The iterations will be requirements gathering and development of the system design.

During requirements gathering, the team used questionnaires to collect data from the users. The team sent a link to a questionnaire developed on Google forms and then received the data in a common email. Thereafter, the team fed the data into a data analysis tool called MS Excel where the system requirements were prioritized and recommendations made.

System Study Results

Existing Systems: Google Maps is one of the popular applications that users know. This application is however, limited in functionality when it comes to helping users adopt to new location. Google Maps is both an Android and a web application that provides users with locations and directions of places based on a global positional system. The application allows the users to find places, locate buildings and view the available routes in a given region (Koutroumanis, 2011). AroundMe android app is also another application that allows users to locate gas stations, bars, guest rooms, restaurants, hospitals and other regions that the users may need. Similar to this app is Places Android app and Near Me applications. These Near Me and AroundMe app help users locate places around them and regions.

System requirements: the study also revealed that there is need to have a system that covers comprehensive requirements to help the visitors become comfortable in their new places. Therefore, the following system requirements were found necessary:

• System Requirements: System availability is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year (99.9% uptime).

• Reporting Requirements: Weekly traffic report should be auto-generated and sent to the business owner of the application.

• Data requirements: interfacing the system with geolocation data, and other regional databases in terms infrastructure, security and services.

• Business requirements: after approval of the system’s database requirements, there should be five weeks of implementation of the project.

• Security requirements: need to secure the system through two level user authentication.

The problem with the current systems revealed include poor security as evident in the lack of authentication, complexity in design, lack of awareness, inadequate features, unreliable, and unavailable.

System Alternatives

Combination of all possible features in one application: The first alternative solution is that the new android application will be unique through combining variety of features across the current applications. However, unique features will include real time chats with receptionists at hotels and various destinations, comparison of prices price range for services, integration with weather monitoring subsystem, booking of taxicabs and mobile payment for advance booking through the app (Koutroumanis, 2011). The cost implication of the alternative are as follows:

Selecting only a few important feature and using third party services: this alterbative involves changing the application features of similar apps and integrating the other features with external parties like google, ATMs, PayPal among others. I will change the design of Town-Guide application to include some features from the Google Maps, AroundMe and Near Me applications. This will help develop the application in a way that users will find the app easier to use due to familiarity of the design hence eliminating sharp learning curves.

System Analyst Recommendation

The most efficient and cost effective alternative is to have an in-built comprehensive features in the system and avoid links to external services. the system will have maximum security and avoid loss of information and confidentiality due to unauthorized sharing of information through third party providers. The new android application will be unique through combining variety of features across the current applications. However, unique features will include real time chats with receptionists at hotels and various destinations, comparison of prices price range for services, integration with weather monitoring subsystem, booking of taxicabs and mobile payment for advance booking through the app (Koutroumanis, 2011). All of these feature will be designed by the project team members. Though the costs may be higher, the solution eliminates huge financial losses that the owners may encounter when attackers exploit the system’s vulnerability through external systems.

Summary

In conclusion, the study revealed that the optimum solution is to combine a variety os features in the Town-guide application by outsourcing and insourcing the human resoruces at additional costs to create the features as part of the system. this solution will reduce the unseen losses due to attacks at the application layer. The general objective of the study is to introduce a new android application for visitors at the end of next month to help lower their travelling costs by 50% and reduce the time for finding places and services to one minute. The project also aims to help visitors find category of services in a region by one click with details such as directions, ratings, costs and security. Therefore, this project is important as it helps reduce the costs of adopting in a new environment.

References

Koutroumanis, D. a. (2011). Technology’s Effect on Hotels and Restaurants: Building a Strategic Competitive Advantage. The Journal of Applied Business and Economics, 12(2001), 72–80.

Appendices

The graph below shows the current issues identified from the study on the current applications with similar functionality: