BUYTIME

Inspiration:

We were inspired by a need, not only on the continent but the world to create a platform where people can get gigs without the need of hiring, create gigs through individual creativity and find a market of people with various skills who are just a few minutes away from. This is the app that gives you the confidence in moving from one location to another knowing you will be able to gain access to any help or skill when needed, the app that buys you time to do the things matter in life.

What it does

Buytime allows people to post jobs and accept to do jobs. Our platform removes the applying for a job process as after we are able to verify someones skillset they would be able to get any job that falls under that skillset to do. We would also allow users who post these jobs we call gigs to post reverse jobs or reverse gigs. These reverse gigs will allow users to post gigs that earn them money, such as ride sharing or deliveries, if they usually post gigs. In order to get people curated gigs we would have a screen where they select the types of gigs they would like to see and we would only show them those kind of gigs. We wanted to implement AI for this feature but were unable to due to time and errors but in the future we would. The payment feature we would implement would allow us to create security for both the user paying for the gig to be done and the user doing the gig. We achieve this by making the payer of the gig, pay for the gig before they are able to successfully post a gig, after this is done the money is then sent to a buffer account where the payer would then confirm the gig has been completed so the money can be sent to the user doing the gig or the creator of the gig denies the gig was completed by which we return the money to the account. When the user who created the gig claims the gig was not completed we reach out to the user who is hired to do the gig to see if that is true, and if not they would be able to use our instant camera feature to take evidence that gig was complete, in which case we would release the money to that user who performed the gig.

How we built it

We built the Application using flutter, first we designed the app flow, which allowed us to focus and understand what features are needed for the app to achieve all the goals we set out, then we designed the UI of the platform and began integrating the functionality and code. We started off with the user authentication and connecting the app to firebase; here we built out the database for all the info we would need the app to have. Then we went into testing the application making sure the posting gigs and chat was saving the info of the users on the database. Then we integrated the google maps Api and Paystack Api for the location and payment functionality respectively.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was in the design of the application in order to deliver a great user experience as well as achieve the aims of the application and integrating the google maps api as it made us to encounter various errors in our code which slowed down the development for a while, as we were stuck debugging why certain errors in our code were not working. Another problem was in setting up the packages and dependencies as we had to make sure they were all compatible and not deprecated. Then we had a problem with integrating the instant camera feature into the application for the verification of the gig being done as we had to find a way to save it temporarily while also finding a suitable UI to make it look pleasing to the eye and enhance the user experience. We failed to implement the AI into our application that would sort the types of gigs users get.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to integrate the google maps API and paystack API successfully, allowing for the application to have a payment option and a option to find gigs near your location and post the gigs based on your location. We were also able to get a good user workflow where we mapped out the most important parts of the user experience into the design of the application

What we learned

We learned the value of planning the user workflow as it allowed us to really understand all the steps involved with building the application which really saved us a lot of time. We also learnt how to adequately utilize the use of stack overflow when debugging. We also gained better skills in designing a cleaner user interface through translating from figma

What's next for BUYTIME

We plan to implement momo payment and a card payment system. We would also be implementing a better UI design gotten from market research as well as a feature to verify the that someone is able to perform a gig, whereby the send us a video of them performing an example of that gig and using AI we analyse the video and make sure the person can perform the gig.

Built With

• css
• dart
• figma
• firebase
• flutter
• google-maps
• html5
• javascript
• paystackapi