Driversity

Rideshare application that empowers minorities and prioritizes safety

Comment 1

Inspiration

Before the Hackathon started, our team brainstormed ideas of what we thought would be best for carrying out a very practical but effective product. We decided to go with "Driversity" because we believed it had more of a real-world impact than the other ideas we had. This meant that Driversity also affected the largest audience and enabled us to successfully implement this idea into the company-specific challenges.

What it does

Our application allows the user to create an account, providing basic information such as their name, email, phone number, etc. (this information is stored for future references). After the user allows the application to access their location, Driversity can then enter Pickup and drop location from the Google Search API.

As soon as the user inputs their location, the application will be displayed with different options for drivers in their area. Details about each driver will be shown, and this information can then be utilized to help the user select the driver of their choice.

Driversity also includes a User Safety Fail Safe. This is a feature where if the user holds the screen for a certain amount of time while in route to their destination, the application will ask the user to confirm a request to call 911 for help. Another feature included in our application is a User/Driver Accessibility Design, which can provide aid for anyone who might have visual impairments while using Driversity. Other features include using roboto font, which allows easy accessibility to tools such as Google Pixel Buds.

One of the more innovative aspects of Driversity is the User Airport Navigation tool. After accessing the user's phone number to confirm the airline, our application will allow the user to enter information booking a flight (departure/arrival date, airport location, terminal number, etc.) Once all of the required information is filled out, Driversity will pre-request a driver to pickup the user at their pick-up location on the date of their flight.

Driversity allows provides generic settings that the driver can change, such as payment methods, accessing documents, earnings summaries, and promotions.

How we built it

First, we conducted user research by questioning people on the value proposition of this product. We questioned hackers at the Hackathon and we questioned recruiters to get a diverse range of responses. We concluded that people feel more confident and comfortable when requesting a rideshare at night with a driver of the same gender and we built our wireframes with that in mind.

We built the initial design of the product using figma. We made 3 drafts of the design based off the research we conducted using our data visualization tools. We converted the figma final mock-ups into flutter front-end mock-ups by importing images into every asset.

After that, we scripted functions to make the mathematical calculations we needed, making all the Google Cloud references required, and scripting all the API's accessed. We embedded these functions into our flutter product to allow for full interactivity.

We did this repetitive design approach for the user app and the driver app. We also used this app approach to create our custom feature to schedule rideshares to the airport with someone they would feel comfortable with.

The website was designed using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS using overlapping lottie animations.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges during this Hackathon was understanding the dynamic of our team. Consisting of 2 freshman as well as 2 newcomers to Hackathon, our team struggled with complex coding problems, utilizing new tools, and staying focused on the user's needs. And to add an additional "handicap" for our team, our team lead was forced to work with a cast on because of his broken hand.

Our first task was to collect user data to identify if the product had any user business value. So, we did a test to see if people cared about their ridesharing experience and the safety associated. Our research revealed that a majority of minorities are uncomfortable using ridesharing services at night, and that became the fuel for our project. We had to split our team up to do effective research and gather over 50 responses in the Hackathon, contact 10 companies, and pull public data from Uber spreadsheets. This gave our team barely 12 hours to code for the remainder of the Hackathon.

Learning how to script functions to support a main coding bank was a difficult task, especially when it came to understanding syntax and API calls. It was also challenging because no one on the team knew how to use flutter before today. However, thanks to the mentor resources used, Youtube videos exploited, and a central focus on improving a user's experience allowed us to build a fully-functionality mock-up under the short constrained amounts of time.

The Google API's was also a challenge because there's little documentation on how to use flutter with Google Cloud products. So the way we got around it was building the products in java and then converting it into dart line-by-line.

Unfortunately, our demo was split up into 4 separate apps due to time constraints and limited internet bandwidth to test them all concurrently with consistent success. With more time, we would integrate all 4 apps into firebase to make simple WiFi calls. However, while we were doing this during the Hackathon, the WiFi was going too slow for us to test our product effectively with all 4 functions connected. We saw our app worked faster when split up into 4 separate functions, and we chose to build like that because of the short amount of time we have for our presentation. If you would like to test the app, and you download our Github repo, it does work fine with less strained WiFi.

Learning how to use the Radar API was also a challenge because the team member in charge of implementing it into our application had to first learn how API's work and then integrate into our code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the limited internet bandwidth, we were still able to make a working demo for our product. And during our product evaluation, we had an extremely positive user feedback and responses. We were also proud of successfully integrating several Google API's without a mentor or teammate that understood dart.

What we learned

Something that our team took away from creating Driversity is that teamwork and collaboration allows tasks to be carried out more efficiently and more effectively. Our final product would not have been possible if it wasn't for our teams ability to work together and complete tasks simultaneously. One of our team member learned how to use flutter overnight, another learned Radar overnight, and others learned UX research and Google Data Studio overnight.

What's next for Driversity

We're considering making a start-up based off the current value proposition that we see. We also want to connect all the tools better with firebase using an ethernet cable. We also want to connect the apps with a traditional back-end to improve scale-ability across any internet connection.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates