Inspiration
Our inspiration for this project stemmed from considering some of the inconveniences associated with travelling. We unanimously agreed that booking flights without having seats together is one of the issues that could be easily remedied.
What it does
Our application allows for passengers on the same flight to switch seats with another passenger before the flight, expediting airport take off time and increasing the customer experience for the passengers. When booking a flight, travelers will be presented with the option to be willing to switch seats if another passenger requests.
How we built it
Using html, css, and javascript for the front-end, and python for the back-end, we were able to create an intuitive user interface which allows users to sign in and add their flights to the database. Then if a passenger wants to request a seat switch they can use to app to see the layout of one of the three plane models provided by the American Airlines API. All of the three seats are color coded according to their availability status. Grey indicates a seat unavailable for trade, blue indicates a booked seat alleviate for trade, and green indicates an un-booked seat. If the seat is green, the switch is made immediately, while if it is blue, the passenger sends a request to the seat holder of the seat they wish to swap, with along with any message they want to justify their request. If the recipient of the requests accepts the offer, the switch is made, else it is not.
Challenges we ran into
Designing the interface came with much trouble as we tried to create an overview of all of the seats inside of the plane and for every type of plane. This would be extremely frustrating because the formatting of each plane would continuously break and we would lose time. Also trying to format the format the seats inside of a background image of the plane would be increasingly difficult as seats would always be out of line or outside the bounds of the plane. Additionally, while storing and retrieving data from a data base wasn't difficult, having multiple users communicating based on a change in database. Also we found ourselves needing many icons and symbols for the seats and the legend and the plane, resulting in the need to learn a little bit about graphic design.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were proud of our user interface interface and our ability to learn enough about javascript to implement an interactive and attractive interface. Additionally we worked extremely hard for all 24 hours, trying to make the most of the time and finish the project.
What we learned
We learned that communication between users is difficult task and formatting can be extremely frustrating. We also learned that we can accomplish a lot through determination and perseverance, and javascript is actually pretty cool if you know how to use if effectively. Also making graphics can be a nice break to programming all the time.
What's next for SeatCheck
In the future we will like to iron out the little inefficiencies and formatting issues, and deploy the app with full functionality between multiple users, which we were unable to fully implement due to running out of time.
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