Vueling Together

Inspiration

Travelling around the world often turns out to be a wonderful oportunity, bringing new experiences, friendships and great memories to those who decide to leave their comfort area in search of adventures abroad. However, one terrible obstacle stands between these brave people and their journeys...

The insufferable boredom of plane flights.

This is a pain all of our team has had to endure, and although several sources of entertainment exist in planes (such as books, movies, etc.), they're still simply a way to kill time until the actual journey begins.

But... what if the plane flight was the true beginning of an adventure?

What it does

Vueling Together transforms something as bland as an airplane trip into an oportunity to connect with other people who are also flying with you by allowing you to chat with them, either in a group common to the entire flight or privately. This way, the crew will be able to meet people with similar interests to theirs, plan their trips together, talk with locals returning to their home about their destination and more, thus finding new oportunities and bonds which might bring them to places they didn't expect.

But not only that: during the homecoming plane trip, users will also be able to put a bow on their journey by reflecting upon it and posting their experiences and pictures, sharing them with their fellow travellers and letting future visitors of that destination watch and rate those posts so that their memories help future users dicover new things about their future journey.

How we built it

The entirety of the project was coded using TypeScript, and the framework React was used for the front-end, whose interface was designed with Figma.

For the demo, the project was hosted at Firebase, even though in practice the platform would run in a LAN, since the Internet is not a feasible option for an application meant to be used during an airplane flight.

Challenges we ran into

One of our main obstacles while developing the project was our initial scope, since our first ideas for the project were quite ambitious for the time we had, so we had to discard some things which, while they would have surely enhanced the experience, were not as important, and they would have slowed down the development of more important features.

In addition, in order to achieve our goals in time with a team with different backgrounds, we had to plan and distribute our tasks very carefully to parallelize the work and give everyone tasks which they could fulfill. However, we believe we managed to overcome this obstacle successfully.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As mentioned, we consider that we managed to accomplish our main goals despite the trouble, and that we succeeded at organizing our time and tasks properly.

In addition, we believe that the product properly represents our vision of the project, giving the impression of an actual Vueling app, and that it delivers the expectations we had when designing and implementing it.

On top of that, as expanded upon on the following section, we managed to acquire new knowledge of areas we were not familiar with and to apply it properly.

What we learned

Every one of us had to work with technology they had not dealt with before, and this helped us adapt to them and learn how to use them. And since we had to put them into practice, we were also able to see the various advantages and disadvantages of each. This was the case with TypeScript, React and Firebase.

On top of that, this project allowed us to familiarize ourselves more with certain fields, such as web design, which was a key element of our project.

What's next for Vueling Together

Despite our satisfaction with the final result, there were some features which, as mentioned earlier, were left our due to our lack of time, since we considered that they exceeded the acceptable scope of our work.

Most of these were related to the application's chat, which provides useful yet rather basic features, and it lacks characteristics like threads, replies and private groups, which, for example, would help users who wanted to share their trip with a specific group of people they met through the app, since our current product would allow anyone in the flight to see those messages unless they're exchanged in a private one-to-one conversation. In addition, these features would make the chat more organized and easy to follow.

Finally, the log in and sign up methods would be updated to permit the use of a QR code to log in, and it would be possible to access the app with an already existing Vueling acocunt as well.