Alarma solidària: implementació d'una aplicació de voluntariat en estat d'alarma

Abstract

[en] In the year 2020, the whole world has experienced a situation of exceptional alarm due to the pandemic caused by COVID-19. As a result of the virus, some people have needed help but have not been able to get it easily. From this situation, the idea to create a platform to connect these people with people who would like to volunteer was born. For the “Treball de Recerca” at the “Bachillerato”, I created a web application to facilitate the search for volunteers in Barcelona. It was the first time that I had carried out a project in the world of programming, so I had to learn many things and I needed to learn many more to be able to make a website that users could and wanted to use. Now that I am finishing my degree in Computer Engineering, I have decided to make an application to consolidate the knowledge acquired in these years. The main objective of this project is to create an application to ask for help and to offer it as a volunteer to the people who need it. The exceptional state of alarm experienced while the project was being carried out has been used to collect realistic data and to put the project into practice. The app is also designed to function in a normal state, but its optimum operation is in a state of alarm, as there is a high demand for applications, as well as a higher supply of volunteers. To build the application, the Design Thinking methodology has been applied. The environment of the application has been analysed, carrying out market reports and benchmarking, as well as an empathy study of the two user profiles of the application - the requester and the volunteer - and a design of the prototype of the application with AdobeXD. Finally, the implementation of the application itself has been carried out considering the heuristics defined in the previous stages and has been evaluated by means of a usability test. The application, called “Alarma Solidària”, has been implemented using the Android Studio development environment through the official language for Android, Kotlin. Google's Firebase platform has also been used to store data in the cloud.