The Vestavia Hills High School Yearbook staff had a problem: It traditionally published a "Senior Achievements" page—a page that listed every school activity that each member of the senior class participated in over their 4 years at the school. That's a lot of information. Furthermore, they traditionally collected this information by hand.
When the staff approached me, I knew this was the kind of problem that can only be solved with custom software. The staff's paper form provided a list of activities that students could check off, as well as space to write in any not on the list. While the staff may have been able to re-create this form in some off-the-shelf survey tool, this would still leave a number of unsolved requirements such as the need to moderate write-in activities.
Thus I came in, and delivered a custom web application that not only replicated their existing workflow, but introduced several meaningful improvements.
The web portal allows students to enter their achievements on any device, including mobile phones, while providing the yearbook staff with simple status reporting and automatic generation of the yearbook pages.
The yearbook staff saw good results: Twice as many students (340 out of a class of 476) completed the form than ever before, while staff time spent was a fraction of what it was the year before.