Swim Port: Online Swimming Lesson Registration Service

CST 499: Computer Science Capstone

David Baker | Haylee Bell
October 4th, 2022
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Executive Summary

Swim Port is an online platform for hosting the lesson signup portion of a swim lesson

program. Small facilities can experience a logjam when it comes to swim lesson sign-ups

because of the need for employees to divert their focus to repetitive tasks supporting customers.

This platform simplifies the process of communicating standard information to potential

customers and creating an interface to make signing up participants for facility programs easier.

Using secure log-in protocols and ensuring customer data stays secure, this platform has

been optimized to efficiently guide users through the process of signing up for facility offerings.

A level of administrative access allows management staff to curate the program and to provide

support to customers having trouble accessing the platform. Providing support to these repetitive

tasks is a way of alleviating the strain on employees and helps a facility run smoothly during the

chaos of busier times. Moving the sign-up process online also allows customers 24/7 access to

information they can use to decide points of involvement. A more informed customer is more

likely to get more out of the experience, establishing a relationship with the customer base as a

reliable and flexible service provider.

A simple and intuitive design helps customers navigate the platform. A graphical

schedule allows customers to see lesson availability and provides a fast sign-up process.

Customer information is hidden from other customers so information security is guaranteed.

Simplifying the sign-up process for lessons makes sense for both employees and customers.

Having an online-facing interface relieves strain on facility employees and gives customers a

way to curate their experience to better suit their needs.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .....................................................................................................2

PART I INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................5

Introduction/Background .............................................................................................5

Project Name and Description .........................................................................5

Problem/Issue in Technology ...........................................................................5

Evidence Project is Needed ..............................................................................6

Project Goals and Objectives ............................................................................6

Environmental Scan ..........................................................................................7

PART II SOCIAL AND LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS ...........................................................8

Stakeholders...................................................................................................................8

Ethical Considerations ...................................................................................................9

Legal Considerations ....................................................................................................10

PART III PROJECT SCOPE ....................................................................................................11

Timeline and Budget .....................................................................................................11

Milestones .........................................................................................................11

Schedule ............................................................................................................12

Project Milestone Breakdown ...........................................................................13

Resources ..........................................................................................................13

Risks and Dependencies ................................................................................................13

Preliminary Usability Test Program ..............................................................................14

Final Deliverables ..........................................................................................................15

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Approach/Methodology ...............................................................................................15

Team Members .............................................................................................................15

REFERENCES .........................................................................................................................17
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Part 1. Introduction

Introduction/Background

Project Name and Description.

Swim Port is an online, publicly-available platform for signing up participants to swim

lessons. It is designed to be used by facilities in need of organization for their swim lesson

programs. Users login and signup with secure communications to get started with Swim Port.

Once registered, users can view lesson offerings at different facilities in a graphical

representation and can sign up participants.

The platform supports facilities by organizing the chaos surrounding a busy swim lesson

signup period. It offers customizable lesson schedule times so each facility can communicate

when their lessons are held to customers. Facility staff no longer have to break from their regular

duties to facilitate a swim lesson program, and customers also benefit by having facility policies

clearly stated, all in one place.

Problem and/or Issue in Technology.

Small swimming facilities without a robustly organized swim lesson program are often

inundated with demand. Facility staff are regularly taken away from their regular duties, the

customer experience suffers for lack of communication or from dealing with overworked staff,

and communication of facility policies to inform the customer is not consistent.

The ubiquitousness of Internet technologies means an online platform to handle repetitive

customer service tasks can alleviate the burdens placed on facility staff and allow them to

provide a higher level of in-person customer service. Swim Port seeks to close this gap by

providing a platform to handle the repetition of informing customers and manually signing them

up for lessons.
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Evidence the proposed project is needed.

During a stint as the Swim Lesson Coordinator at a local public swimming facility, one of

the developers was asked by management to research options to automate parts of the swim

lesson signup process to alleviate strain on other staff members, particularly the front desk

receptionists as their responsibilities cover answering phones and directing customer inquiries.

The overwhelming demand shown during lesson signup periods coupled with the technological

literacy of the public are conditions allowing for successful outsourcing of the more repetitive

tasks to an online format.

Project Goals and Objectives

Goal: Objectives:

Create positive user experience.
1. Use style choices so site is easy to use and
navigate. Will implement tools such as
Bootstrap and CSS.
2. Include personalized login experience to
each user. Include option to create profile and
save in database.
3. Provide users the option to search by
experience level and location for swim
classes.
4. Allow user to register for entire program or
individual swim class depending on their
needs.

Allow user to register for swim classes.
1. Create page specifically for registration
and once necessary info has been added, send
message saying whether or not it was
successful. Will send registration information
to database.
2. Include administration user profile able to
view and confirm who has been registered for
classes.
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Program will be useful for administrative 1. Create administrative level accounts with
tasks. more tools and resources than regular user
accounts. Example: Admin should be able to
add and delete accounts as well as add
instructors to a course.
2. Allow administration to view all courses
and information of everyone who has signed
up. Possibly will also include option to
generate statistics for month such as number
of students per class and enrollment rate
based on instructor.

Program is able to be used by different 1. Program will be generic and code written
companies. clearly so minor changes can be made to suit
different businesses.

Environmental Scan

Most facilities' lesson registration systems are dependent on the local technology of the

facility, leaving the organization to spreadsheets, paper, etc. The facilities generally have a

public-facing website inviting prospective customers to call-in. This confines customer service to

business hours and restricts the capacity to handle increased traffic.

There do not appear to be facility-specific offerings among the mobile device app stores.

Most products with similar offerings to the proposed project are multi-faceted wellness booking

platforms. These platforms include WellnessLiving (wellnessliving.com), Appointy

(appointy.com), Bookeo (bookeo.com), Thryv (thryv.com), and MindBody

(mindbodyonline.com) among others. These products have several things in common: access via

mobile and desktop platforms, payment integration, class calendars, student tracking capabilities

as an administrative user, and the ability to offer promotions, membership packages, and other

personalized offerings.
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It appears most of these existing platforms do not address swim lessons specifically. The

products are mostly focused on providing services to fitness studios and private parties whose

business is completely based around the offerings on these platforms. It does not appear these

products address the needs of facilities where swim lessons are a side offering with more

demanding requirements compared with their normal business services.

Part 2. Social and Legal Considerations

Stakeholders

The main stakeholders for this project would consist of business owners and managers.

Specifically the program will appeal to business owners, trainers, and swim instructors. Ideally,

we would want the stakeholders to be people who are willing to use the product themselves in

their businesses. Owners or managers of youth programs and gyms would be the best candidates.

Any type of company offering fitness lessons would be the stakeholders we would want

investing in our program. While the focus currently is for swimming lessons, the program could

be expanded to accommodate other kinds of lessons and sign up based programs. Stakeholders

also would include parties who are interested in providing resources to assist with expanding the

product.

Stakeholders stand to get in on the ground floor of a potentially profitable product.

Additionally, stakeholders using the program could see an increase of sign ups for their

swimming lessons which would lead to an increase in profits. If the product release is successful

and expansion occurs, the stakeholders would see a significant return on their investment.

However, there is an inherent risk in being a stakeholder for any start up. The product could run

into issues and not work as smoothly as intended. If the user interface is not actually user
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friendly then the main goal of the program has not been reached. This could cause companies to

not want the product and stakeholders to lose money.

Ethical Considerations

The project as described will need to provide accommodations for several ethical

concerns. Areas of concern involve accessibility of the website and information privacy. Site

design will need to be developed for potential users who are part of populations with low digital

literacy or physical conditions demanding assistive technologies to interact with the website

(W3C, 2019). Information security will be critical as users will need to input personal

information to create an account and to track participant involvement in lessons.

Web accessibility standards are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C,

2019). Members of several underprivileged populations could be affected by design decisions

and will need consideration to minimize obstructive impacts on their access and use of the

platform. The recommendations applicable to the project have to do with the ability to access

information and site navigation.

Text needs to be provided for all non-text content so it can be changed to other forms, e.g.

large print, braille, et al. Site styling also plays a part in accessibility. The color palette will need

to be chosen to provide high contrast between the text and backgrounds it may appear against. If

colors are used to convey availability information, they will need to be supplemented with text.

The site will need to be developed so there will be no loss of functionality or content under text

size or spacing property changes.

Site navigability will also be considered during the design phase. An easy to understand

interface with a high-contrast color palette and descriptive page titles will help direct and orient
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users while using the site. Users who can only use a keyboard will need to be considered as well

so the site can be navigated via unmodified arrow or tab keys. Links to other pages or sites will

need descriptive text so the purpose of the destination of the link is obvious. Site navigation

should also be prominently displayed and comprehensive so a high level of digital literacy is not

necessary to move through the site and use its functions.

User safety also needs to be considered as swimming and learning to swim are dangerous

activities and need qualified supervision. While a discussion of the ethical considerations of

sending participants to certified and safe facilities are outstanding as of this point, they will be

handled in more depth in the "Legal Considerations" section below.

Legal Considerations

Facilitating personalization of user experiences and providing a useful service compelling

users to return will require some collection of personal information (PI, hereafter). An option to

avoid the account creation process and add participants will be provided for those who wish for

excess PI to not be stored. Several federal and California state laws govern how PI is protected

online (Thomson Reuters Legal, n.d.). This platform will be designed to protect PI using

encrypted transmission of login information and not disclosing participant information to meet

these legal standards. Generally participants in swim lessons are children, whose privacy online

is protected by the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA, passed in 1998)

(Thomson Reuters Legal, n.d.). To satisfy the requirements in this act, an online privacy policy

will need to be created and posted, only necessary personal information will be collected, and

reasonable security measures in the form of secure logins and the passing of non-parameterized

data between the database and the website's back-end.

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A layer of protection for the website and its shareholders will be necessary as this

platform does not have an ownership-based relationship with the facilities providing lessons. A

website legal statement can be used to disclaim legal liability for services rendered by the

facilities on the site. Facility insurance and instructor certifications can be vetted by the platform

to provide an extra layer of ethical consideration.

Part 3. Project Scope

Timeline/Budget

1. Milestone Timeline.
Project Proposal Finalized Sunday Oct.23

Record Project Requirements Mon Oct 24

Design Project - User stories Wed Oct 26

Design Project - User flow Wed Oct 26

Design Project - Create framework to support Thu Oct 27

requirements

Database plan finished Sat Oct 29

Website plan finished Sat Oct 29

Development Sat Oct 29 - Tue Nov 22

Testing/Focus Group Week 5 - Nov 23 - 29

Refactor/Debug Week 6 - Nov 29 - Dec 6

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2. Schedule.
Mod Weekly Schedule

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thur Fri Sat

0 Oct 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

-Project -Requirements -End Mod0 -User Stories -Design -Website plan -Start
Proposal Complete Complete website plan Complete Development
Finalized -Create User -Design User -Assign dev -Plan DB
Stories flow roles

1 Oct 30 31 Nov 1 2 3 4 5

-Implement -All Hallow's -End Mod1 Completed:

Database Eve Login, Admin
pages

2 Nov 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

-End Mod2 Completed:

User pages

3 Nov 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

-End Mod3 Completed:

sign up
system done

4 Nov 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

-End Mod4 -Thanksgiving

-Product
ready to test

5 Nov 27 28 29 30 Dec 1 2 3

-End Mod5
-Refactor/Deb
ug

6 Dec 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

-End Mod6 -Capstone

Final
Presentation

7 Dec 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

End Mod7 End Mod8

8 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Festivus! Christmas
Eve!
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3. Project Milestone Breakdown.

Project Proposal Finalized
Record Project Requirements
Discussion of needs for project
What will resolve those needs
Design Project - Create a framework to satisfy user stories, Establish a visual style
User stories
User flow
Create framework to support requirements
Development
Login/signout system
Admin pages
User pages
Sign-up system
Testing/Focus Group
Develop test cases, test
Provide credentials to test users

Refactor/Debug
Assess results of testing
Observe areas of program/system needing improvement
Orient to what improvements need to be made to acquire expected results
Do
Assess results of debugging/refactor/maintenance

4. Resources.
The list of resources to be used:
Replit - development platform
Heroku - database provider
Google Drive - document share
Email, Slack, Zoom - basic communication

Risks and Dependencies

As with any project, there is a risk of not completing the service on time. There are

multiple factors in play and there is a chance certain tasks take longer than expected or

unforeseen problems arise. For the database we have considered using Heroku and there could be

challenges getting the frontend, backend, and database to work properly together. If we decide to
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use a different approach for the database with a system we aren’t familiar with, it could lead to

problems due to inexperience. This has been determined to be an acceptable risk as there are

plenty of resources available to guide us through the process.

As far as dependencies go, it is important we have a functional backend and then

database running before working on the user interface. The goal should be to first create the

backend and ensure the program is able to receive and store information. We can start with a

basic frontend and once everything is operating as desired, we can move on to making the visible

portion of the program more user friendly. Following this setup should help ensure we have a

working and presentable project.

Preliminary Usability Test Program

The plan is to test usability by having a focus group consisting of customers, managers,

and instructors. The customers, parties interested in signing up for swimming lessons, should be

able to view available lessons by time, instructor, and swim level. They should then be able to

sign up and receive a confirmation page. Managers should be able to view a list of classes and

enrollment totals as well as all instructors. Swim instructors should be able to view their swim

class slots and group totals for each of their classes. If possible, we hope to have people test this

product who actually work in this field.

Once the focus group has completed their testing the goal would be to have a survey to

provide feedback and an option for us to see their results. Ideally, we would want to watch the

participants test the program live either in person or over a virtual meeting. If not possible we

would like them to record them using the program. Once finished, the participant will fill out a

survey and this data will be used to determine if changes or improvements are needed.
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Final Deliverables

The final deliverables will include the completed website and approval from the focus

group or potential client. Another goal is to have final surveys available to demonstrate the

changes we made from the test group’s feedback.

Approach/Methodology

The approach to development will use the Agile methodology as a framework.

Development sprints will occur weekly and will be guided by the milestone schedule laid out

above. The deliverable of each evolution will be audited upon completion for quality assurance.

Behavior-Driven Development principles will be used in the form of creating user stories.

The stories will guide organization and development of web pages to fulfill those stories. Unit

testing will occur throughout the development process. Tutorials and projects from CST 336

Internet Programming will be the reference for building an Express application.

The process leading up to each milestone will consist of team communication to observe

the current state of the application, discussion and orientation to the plan for the next phase of

development, developing the deliverables satisfying the agreed upon plan, and assessing those

deliverables for functionality and accuracy. Deadlines in the above schedule will guide

component development.

Team Members

David Baker

David Baker (DB) will be responsible for quality control on project requirements so they

fit client needs. DB will also be the contact for the end users/client when it is time to start testing.
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The general site design and database design are being made by DB and will be conceptual

starting points for the project components.

Haylee Bell

Haylee Bell (HB) will provide quality assurance so project quality meets requirements

from the user stories. HB will be responsible for developing page design based on user stories

created by the development team and for auditing the results of each sprint.

As part of the development team both members will be responsible for submitting user

stories, choosing components to develop, and unit testing. The development team will need

regular internal communication to stay aligned with regard to general site design and user

experience. One or more components may need to be developed by multiple members of the

development team. Team communication will inform all members of the status of these

components and will aid any troubleshooting efforts.

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References

Appointy. (n.d.). Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://www.appointy.com/

Bookeo. (n.d.). Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://www.bookeo.com/

MindBody. (n.d.). Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://www.mindbodyonline.com/

NCSL. (2022, June 7). State laws related to digital privacy. Retrieved October 6, 2022 from

https://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-information-technology/state-laws-re

lated-to-internet-privacy.aspx

Thomson Reuters Legal. (n.d.). Internet privacy laws revealed - how your personal information

is protected online. Retrieved October 6, 2022, from

https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/insights/articles/how-your-personal-information-is-prote

cted-online

Thryv. (n.d.). Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://www.thryv.com/

WellnessLiving. (n.d.). Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://www.wellnessliving.com/

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). (2019, Oct). How to meet WCAG (quickref Reference).

Retrieved October 6, 2022, from https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/