AirLyft

Uber within Airports

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Inspiration 💡

Picture this: you book your flights to Europe, create a fancy itinerary, pack three suitcases and reach the airport only to realize that you’ve overpacked, your back hurts, and you just can’t make it to the departure gate. Well, you’ve just viewed the world from the eyes of an adventurous 70-year old Grandpa.

Traveling is a problem for seniors. Surveys of international travelers show that only 25 percent of seniors (aged 65+) take international trips, compared to 45 percent of the general population.

A contributing factor to is a lack of services at tourist-heavy places like airports. Expecting our seniors, 24% of whom experience some sort of disability, to carry 50lbs around in an airport is absolutely inhumane.

What it does 🤔

To make travel easier for our future wrinkly selves, we made AirLyft, a luggage carrying service at airports. On Airlyft, young individuals, who we call carriers, get hired by prospective travelers to drop their luggage at the airport gate. We also imagine Airlyft being used by younger travelers that prefer the luxury of not carrying their things around the airport.

As a proof of concept, our team has observed that such a service is present and widely used in developing countries like India, Brazil, and Bangladesh.

How we built it ⚙️

For the front-end, we’ve used Flutter & Material Design. The backend is implemented using Firebase. We use several Firebase services like Firebase Functions, Firebase Functions, & Firebase Database. We also use external APIs like Aviation Stack and Google Maps.

  • For the backend we have used Stripe for the payment gateway:-

stripe

  • Tech Stack :-

ts.jpg

Design 🎨

We were heavily inspired by the revised version of Iterative design process, which not only includes visual design, but a full-fledged research cycle in which you must discover and define your problem before tackling your solution & then finally deploy it.

Double-Diamond

  1. Discover: a deep dive into the problem we are trying to solve.
  2. Define: synthesizing the information from the discovery phase into a problem definition.
  3. Develop: think up solutions to the problem.
  4. Deliver: pick the best solution and build that.

This time went for the minimalist Material Design. We utilized design tools like Figma to prototype our designs before doing any coding. Through this, we are able to get iterative feedback so that we spend less time re-writing code.

des.jpg

Research 📚

Research is the key to empathizing with users: we found our specific user group early and that paves the way for our whole project. Here are a few of the resources that were helpful to us —

CREDITS

  • Design Resources : Freepik
  • Icons : Icons8, noun project
  • Font : Roboto / Raleway / Jost

Challenges we ran into 😤

We face some challenges during the hackathon. Only one member in our team had experience and knowledge about Flutter. All of us learned Flutter as well as the Dart Language while building AirLyft which made it time consuming to create straightforward functionality. We also struggled with time management since three of our teammates are first-time hackers.

  • Payments Issue: We faced issues while using Stripe API since the Flutter package is newly intorduced.
  • Flutter Widgets: Transforming highly dynamic ideas created in Figma into Flutter Widgets and Layouts.
  • Integration of Modules - Connecting the Various APIs, SDK’s and JSON data with front-end UI Components was challenging!

Accomplishments that we're proud of ✨

We are proud of finishing the project on time which seemed like a tough task as we started working on it quite late due to other commitments and were also able to add most of the features that we envisioned for the app during ideation. Moreover, we learned a lot about mobile development and other APIs that we were able to incorporate into our project to meet our unique needs. And as always, working overnight was pretty fun! :)

This project was especially an achievement for us because this time the experience was very different than what we have while building typical hackathon projects, which also includes heavy brainstorming, extensive research, and yes, hitting the final pin on the board.

What we learned 🙌

Proper sleep is very important! :p Well, a lot of things, both summed up in technical & non-technical sides. Also not to mention, we enhanced our googling and Stackoverflow searching skill during the hackathon :)

What's next for AirLyft🚀

We want to build another mobile application focused on our partners, Carriers. This is to make their freelancing experience with airports seamless and easy and to help them provide a great service to our customers, travelers.

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