Smart Tenant

Project Description:

We know moving is a stressful experience, and when you have to move, it means something important is happening in your life. What do you look for when choosing a place to live? Location, nearby amenities, quality of the building, but most importantly, it’s the community. The community is what makes you feel at home and what you can rely on during a crisis.

Our project charter was to create a mobile application and an admin portal for Smart Living Properties. The goal was to create an interactive and engaging cross-platform mobile application to expand their reach and engagement, as currently, Smart Living Properties has 200+ properties around Ottawa with thousands of tenants. It was paramount that the application focused on accessibility, inclusiveness, and a simplistic design to be usable by a wide range of users. With accessibility and inclusivity in mind, we also created an intuitive admin dashboard to facilitate content management and moderation for the mobile application.

The Algonquin College’s Data Analytics Centre, a team, composed of Kiet Vuong (Team Lead), Evan Liko (Mobile App Developer), Son Tran (Web Developer), and Kseniia Chornokondratenko (UI/UX Designer) started working with the goal of achieving the client’s vision. Throughout the project, we learned that constant communication and collaboration were essential for effective group functioning. Moreover, we used the GitHub project management tool to help alleviate stress, increase productivity, host our codebase, and meet deadlines. We also used Figma as a collaborative interface design tool in order to design our administration portal and mobile application.

With community, safety, and accessibility as our core values, the team and the client came up with the list of features that were essential for the product; some notable features are private messaging between tenants, moderation of Not Safe For Work (NSFW) content on the newsfeed and marketplace screens through the use of AI, managing tenants, and sending correspondence by leveraging Cloud Functions. For the front end, we use the most professional and trusted cross-platform technologies to date, React Native Expo and ReactJS, to ensure it looks just right on both the mobile devices and the web portal. We used Google’s Firebase services for secure and robust data storage and transmission for our backend. All our data is kept here in Canada.

With the project’s phase nearing an end, we can say that this was the biggest project we have all had the opportunity to work on. Although we faced many challenges along the way, it was an experience that deepened our knowledge of designing and developing the product on a large scale.

We want to express our gratitude to our stakeholders, Rowland Gordon, tenants and staff of Smart Living Properties, Algonquin College, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council for their support and for this wonderful opportunity to be part of the team.

Contact the Team

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