favor

Inspiration

It's 3pm on Sunday and the Sproul Hall laundry room is packed with students trying to cram in their laundry before the school week starts. Your laundry's been done for 2 seconds but the Sproul Hall group chat is freaking out for no reason. The problem is, you're at BPlate and can't switch your laundry to the dryer any time soon. Wouldn't it be nice if you someone could switch it for you!

Enter favor, an centralized app where anyone can request small tasks for a price or make a little extra cheese helping their community out. Simply create a new favor, add a description, name a price and time, and watch your laundry get done while you enjoy your meal at BPlate. For tasks ranging from filling up your water bottle to walking a friend back from a party, you can trust favor to safely get your favors done. Get favoring!

What it does

favor provides users with casual opportunities to seek help or help out others in their community. Users can either request their own favor, or browse active favors nearby. favor is targeted towards communities, meaning that the people completing your favors will be people that you know and trust. With location services and the ability to add friends, users will always interact with their friends, workplace, apartment building, or any other localized group. This keeps our platform safe and trustworthy.

How we built it

Our development process was split into two main steps: design via Figma and implementation via code. We started by deciding on a color palette and design. Once this was finalized, we began wireframing in Figma. At the same time, we worked on backend code such as setting up the PostgreSQL database, as it was not dependent on the design. As wireframes became more flushed out on Figma, we slowly began developing frontend components.

color-palette

Challenges we ran into

One of the major challenges we ran into was working hybrid. Due to unforeseen circumstances, one of our team members was unable to work in person. As a result, our team had to adjust roles and responsibilities in the middle of the hackathon. To work around this issue, team members in person worked on product and design while the remote team member primarily contributed to presentation and demos. Ultimately work breakdown was successful and our team was able to complete both the product and the presentation.

What's next for favor

The next step for favor is to get deployed. There are still quite a few things to get ironed out with the application, but once those have been worked on favor is bound for the App store. Our goal is to market and publicize favor at schools initially, with the ultimate goal to be used in workplace, apartment, or general public settings. In addition to deploying favor, we also plan on adding smarter recommendation systems for favors. With more user data, we can use natural language processing to parse favor descriptions and determine which users to push notifications to. This will improve user experience and expedite the favor completion process.