Design and implementation of a web interface for Axis global testing Live Sites
Niklas Grahl, Aron Söderling · Lund University Publications Student Papers (Lund University) · 2015
Designing and developing a software product is a difficult process. The product must be usable and solve the correct problem. At the same time, the underlying code must be well written. Many projects fail to deliver or exceed their budget. This thesis explores a practical approach to software design and development that tries to adhere to both user centered design and agile development. The process follows Google Ventures’ design sprint model and also takes inspiration from Jacob Nielsen's discount usability methods. This approach is applied to a real project at Axis Communications. The goal of the project was to design and implement a web application for monitoring and analyzing data from Axis global weather testing ``Live Sites''. The data was collected and analyzed manually which was a very time consuming process. It was difficult to interact with the data in order to see correlations between the weather and the camera images. We were able design a solution to this and implement it during four iterations. Each iteration consisted of a design sprint, an implementation sprint and an evaluation phase. The design sprints were fast and effective, which meant we could spend more time on building the actual product while still being confident that we were building something that would actually work. Through continuous usability evaluation and regular stakeholder meetings we were able to validate our design. The project resulted in a web application consisting of a number of interactive dashboards. Our conclusion is that the resulting interface solves the problem of interacting with the ``Live Site'' data and should provide a good foundation to build upon. We also conclude that Google Ventures' design sprint is a powerful and effective model which could be of great benefit to software development projects.