The Inspiration
A lot of people, especially women and people of marginalized identities, feel unsafe traveling alone late at night. One of the main fears is that if a cab or an uber were to stray from the route and head in the wrong direction, there is little that the passenger can do to protect themselves. Our app exists to address that fear.
The App
First, Bon Voyage collects necessary data such as name, contacts, and common destinations. Then, at the start of a trip, Bon Voyage interfaces with Google Maps to find the best route from your current location to your destination and notes the estimated time of arrival. As you travel, the app updates the route to go from the (new) current location to the destination, and if the ETA of this new route is more than 10 or 15 minutes greater than the original time, the user is given an alert with the option to send a message to their emergency contacts. At a 20-minute discrepancy, the notification is automatically sent. With a clean and smooth interface, Bon Voyage is intuitive and easy to use for anyone, no matter how disoriented, tired, inebriated, or under the influence they may be.
The Development Process
This app was built using html, css, and javascript/jquery. Some of our members came in with a basic knowledge of html and css, while others did not; none of us had any experience with javascript. As such, the development process was certainly challenging; not only were we attempting to design and create an app for the first time, we were also doing it in languages in which we were not familiar. Early Saturday morning, we asked the web development presenter for some help; our idea was later used as an example during the web development workshop itself. Even still, it was at times immensely frustrating and even discouraging. Even now, the app doesn't do everything we originally wanted and planned for it to do. However, we are extremely proud that in under 24 hours, we learned the basics of web development, picked up several new languages, and built a working demo of a much-needed web app. We are especially proud of the usability of the front-end.
The Future
First and perhaps most importantly, we would like to add texting capabilities to the app; while e-mails accomplish the baseline task of notifying emergency contacts, text messages tend to be received and read much more rapidly, which makes them better suited to our purposes. In addition, once the web app is complete, we would like to develop Bon Voyage in mobile platforms as well (e.g. Android, iOS). We used a web app to make it accessible to as many users as possible without needing to code in multiple languages, but eventually we would like to specialize them into mobile apps; this will give us greater access to useful data such as contacts, and make the app more intuitive for users. We would also like to look into expanding into other forms of transportation, such as buses, where appropriate.
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