What is Qardless?
Qardless is a SaaS (Software as a service) application targeted towards businesses who provide paper certificates as proof of obtaining a qualification and consists of two separate applications; a mobile application for end users and a desktop application for administration staff. An example of a certificate might include one stating a qualification to operate heavy machinery or that you are skilled in manual handling.
The danger of certificate loss and/or fabrication is decreased as employees store certificates digitally in cloud storage using our web application and users can access these certificates via a QR code through our mobile application. Since these qualifications have expiration dates, they must periodically be renewed. Businesses can export a list of clients whose certification are going to expire within a certain time frame of their choosing.
Project Proposal Goals:
In November 2022, we agreed to a project proposal with our product owner.
- Store secure, authenticated, digitized training certificates.
- A unique static/dynamic QR code which can be scanned to produce a PDF of the certificate.
- Employees capable of flagging issues with certificates given in error or any other issues in general. They can freeze certificates and accounts.
- An option to add your certificates to your Google/Apple wallet.
- Able to download certificates as PDF therefore allowing them to be shared.
- Employees capable of assigning and unassigning certificates.
- Export a list of previous clients and certificate expiry dates, who are due for training within 6 weeks.
Release 1: Completed goals 1,2,3 & 5.
Release 2.0: Completed goals 6 & 7 (Goal 4 was assigned to Release 2.0A)
Tech Stack
External Collaborator
Safety First Consultancy Ltd is a local company from Dundalk who specialise in a complete Health & Safety service for any business where they can perform a thorough audit of systems and equipment. Since its launch 10 years ago, Safety First has undergone many modifications, ensuring that they remain completely up-to-date with the latest updates in technology and to ensure that their customers receive the highest quality of service.
Services Offered
Safety Training
Promo Video
Future for Qardless
Due to having a small team of developers and timing issues, we were unable to develop Qardless with all the features we had planned at the start. However, we do feel very proud of the product we have created otherwise and are happy with how we developed other personal skills in the process. It has been a great learning experience. The overall concept can be developed further into many great things.
The QRew took an elective called Human Factors in Design and we all probed different areas of human factors in design in order to come up with some recommendations for Qardless.
Brian focused on ergonomic analysis, Jacqueline focused on human information processing and cognitive analysis and Ethan focused on human error.
Following on from the module, based on our analysis, we made the following recommendations for Qardless:
- Our own Qardless QR code scanner with instant feedback and fast scan mode.
- Log of QR scans kept.
- Wearable QR codes.
- Login with fingerprint.
More details can be found in the portfolio here.
Meet The Team Behind Qardless
Jacqueline O'Connor
Project Lead: Responsible for managing and leading the team towards our end goal. Coordinate and organize team meetings and motivate team to meet deadlines. Resolve conflict and help maintain a positive and productive working environment.
Scrum Master: Facilitated the scrum process, created a document of guidelines to ensure the team adhered to scrum principles. Organised daily stand up meetings, sprint retrospectives and planned releases and sprints. Liaised with product owner.
Backend Development: Developed ASP .NET Core API used for both web and mobile application, database redesign for release 2. Created Azure blob storage container for PDF certificate storage. Developed a Flask API and a Python QR code generator, all hosted on Azure.
Brian McKenna
Frontend Development: Responsible for all frontend development of the web application and mobile application. Learned a new technology; React Native. Also played a part in backend development when needed.
UI Design: Liaising with the scrum master and product owner to develop UI prototypes according to the needs of the project scope.
Repository Management: Managing all GitHub repositories. Created a document of guidelines for the team to follow to achieve good practice for version control.
Ethan Sia
UX Analyst: Studied user needs in order to improve the applications usability.
Software Testing: Created test cases to test code functionality.
User Testing: Created test cases for real end users, conducted real end user testing.