DawGo: Help Local Business

Inspiration

During the pandemic, many local businesses were closed due to no customers. After we realized one of our favorite restaurants on the Ave was closed because of the pandemic, we decided to do something for them to help recover their business. When we first settled on helping with the local business track, we figured out that one of the ways to welcome back local businesses is to increase the physical interactions between the customers and the local business sellers. We would like a gamified system to encourage users to go to, or stop at local stores. We got our inspiration as a gamified rewarding system from Pokemon Go, in which people tend to make great efforts to capture a Pokemon outside. We want to include such a rewarding system that can motivate users to stop by any local business and keep users coming back to the app.

What it does

DawGo is a web app that helps and encourages users to discover local businesses around UW and get rewards in a gamified way.

How we built it

We implemented the web application design by HTML/CSS, and through the use of JavaScript we made it more interactive. We also used Bootstrap and the Vue.js framework to better achieve our objectives. To implement the map feature, we embedded Google Map SDK to let users discover the area around the UW.

Challenges we ran into

The time given for the SWE hack 22’ is limited. There are many features we wish we could have the time to implement but finally decided to mainly focus on our main functionalities instead. We also noticed the importance of the roles of business owners in our app design. Without further cooperation and communication with them, our application lacks real-life foundations and necessary information from the stakeholders.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We came up with a brand new concept of user-merchant interaction with gamified elements, and implemented this feature in the website. By using the Google Map SDK, our website allows users to get the location of the local businesses surrounding the U district and thus helping with the local business recovery.

What we learned

We learned how to express our thoughts to group members in a logical way, collaborate with each other more efficiently, and combine each members’ idea together effectively into our final project. For web development, our members grasped the skill of CSS and javascript to present the website, and we learned a lot during the workshops and decided to use them to improve our app.

What's next for DawGo: Help Local Business

For our future plans, we hope to expand our map to the greater area and hopefully around the US, so more local businesses can benefit from our app; We also want to build connections among users and their friends, so they could share sticker collections, or check each other’s location (like Zenly) and meet up. To further help local businesses and stores, we can cooperate with sellers and provide discount coupons to attract users and encourage consumption. We’d like to create an AI filter that can automatically identify local stores, so they can be located more accurately and easier to help.