Designing and Developing a Mobile Application to Coordinate Clinical Education and Training of Undergraduate Nursing Students: A Conceptual Framework and Design-and-Development

Introduction: Coordinating clinical education and training between nursing education institutions and clinical placement sites remains a persistent challenge, contributing to miscommunication, unfulfilled clinical hours, and inconsistent supervision. Mobile technology, and mobile applications specifically, have been proposed as a mechanism to strengthen this coordination. Objective: This manuscript describes the conceptual framework and the design-and-development process of a mobile application (WILApp) intended to coordinate the clinical education and training of undergraduate nursing students at a university in Gauteng, South Africa, and reports the practice-oriented theoretical structure and the nine-step technical development process that produced it. Methods: A design and developmental research (DDR) approach, situated within Phase 2 (the design/development phase) of a four-phase, convergent mixed-methods study, was used. Phase 1 qualitative and quantitative data, analysed respectively through thematic analysis and descriptive statistics and merged using a side-by-side comparison method, together with the literature review and theoretical framework, informed the requirements gathering, technology-stack selection, and user-interface design undertaken in partnership with an appointed information technology (IT) company under a signed non-disclosure and service-level agreement. Pseudonymised registration and role-based access control safeguarded participant data throughout the design and development process. Results: A conceptual framework based on Dickoff, James and Wiedenbach's survey list for practice-oriented theory was developed, specifying the agents, recipients, context, procedure, dynamics, and outcome of the mobile application. The resulting application, WILApp, was built using React Native with a Firebase backend and comprised screens for registration, login, clinical hours tracking, assessment, progress, and data report generation. Development followed nine sequential steps: requirements gathering; user interface and user experience design; technology stack selection; backend development; mobile application development; testing and quality assurance; documentation and release readiness; deployment and support; and maintenance and future enhancements. Conclusion: A theory-driven, iterative design-and-development process, grounded in integrated empirical findings and a practice-oriented conceptual framework, produced a functional, purpose-built mobile application capable of supporting the coordination of clinical education and training. This process offers a replicable model for developing similar digital tools in resource-constrained nursing education contexts.