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Overview
The Los Alamitos PT Exercise App is an online home exercise program that allows Physical Therapists to create, and read exercises from a database and create workouts for patients. These workouts can be printed to give to the patient for home exercises at home.
The company had been utilizing another online home exercise program for the better part of 15 years. However, the said application was built using Flash, which was losing support by the end of 2020. I was assigned the task of architecting a new application that not only replicated the old software, but was also modern, both in look and in software language. I decided upon HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to be the languages for this web application.
Languages & Technologies
- JavaScript
- HTML
- CSS
- NodeJS
- Firebase
- Figma
Process
As the solo developer for this project, I was tasked with designing everything from the ground up. A seemingly daunting task I began by breaking down the project into manageable pieces. First I spoke with the users, the physical therapists, taking note of their requirements and use cases for the application. I categorized each of the requirements as either “essential to function” or “nice to have” groups. This helped me narrow my focus and decide what features to start on first. After nailing down the basic requirements for a minimum viable product, I needed to think of user interface and user experience.
I determined that all of the staff would use this software at work, on a desktop. I reasoned that a desktop-first approach to design was acceptable in this situation, and I could make it responsive for smaller devices once the MVP was created. I turned to Figma to start a flow chart of how the user was going to access this application. After mapping out the flow chart, I turned to creating the layout of each page, and various states of usage such as incorrect login or open modal. My primary goal of the design was to make it modern, and more importantly, user friendly. I researched the latest UI trends, and tried to implement that in my work. On top of that, I wanted to keep the application simple and intuitive. My goal was to have a user be able to use the app without needing to read extensive documentation or, best case scenario, any at all.
Challenges & Solutions
This was the first application where I had to take on multiple roles. I was in charge of UI/ UX design, programming the app, managing the database, and deploying it. There was a lot of growing pains associated with this project, but I ultimately learned a massive amount. I had to figure out how to limit budget restraints of reading and writing to the database. For this I implemented pagination measures to limit database queries to what was needed.