Department of Fisheries Mobile Application Case Study

You don’t always get reception while at sea, so it made sense that fisheries officers had an app with offline data.

When on the water, Department of Fisheries officers are required to make licence queries. And, if you’ve ever been out far enough on the water, you’ll know that reception and signal can be rare to find while on the deep blue sea. 

The Department of Fisheries manages the marine and freshwater fisheries and ecosystems within our state of WA. Their aim is to conserve, sustainably develop and share Western Australia's aquatic resources and their ecosystems for the benefit of present and future generations.

Before we did our magic, officers out at sea would attempt to call the office (sometimes with no luck) and ask a team member to do a lookup and confirm details. Yes, they would be at sea, trying to call the office to get a prompt check, and as you can imagine, it wasn’t a quick or robust process.

It seemed obvious that the Department of Fisheries needed its officers to be able to access fishing licence and registration data on a portal mobile application - something quick and independent of needing to have a live connection to the internet (or be able to call an office). Even better if this could be done single handedly, with the other hand to help the officers balance while on the waves.

The benefit of creating this in the form of a mobile application is that it can go with the officer, in and out of the boat, whether they are onshore or not. It also meant less reliance on other team members.