Group Members
Keith Phox (mphox)
Cristina Lozano (clozano)
Will Whitney (wwhitney)
Problem Statement
People often have trouble deciding what to do. We want to make an app that uses the power of suggestion to help a person decide how to spend their free time based on day of the week, time of day, and their specification of suggestion category (such as food, places to go, books, movies). The application will start by selecting options from multiple categories randomly or the user can specify a type of activity they are looking for and the suggestions will be filtered to fit that type. We believe that lots of services provide suggestions based on your previous purchases (like Amazon) or your previous visits (like Yelp) or even your music preferences (like Pandora) but that a purely spontaneous suggestion based on less history can be a really great and useful thing; it can get a user to consider something they might never have been exposed to before.
We plan to tackle this problem by creating a mobile application on the android platform. Having a mobile application will let a user that is already out find something fun without tying them down to a laptop or desktop. The easily accessible phones will also allow the user to quickly and spontaneity make plans no matter where they are. Having a mobile application provides more freedom because the user can either use it from home or on the road. For the user in a new area without any plans, the phone’s location features will allow the application to suggest things that are already near by. In addition, a mobile application is ideal for guidance since the user will carry a map with them that updates their location as they move in real time and updates the directions as they go. Having a mobile application also allows a user to find a new suggestion of something to do when then have already gone out to do something and their prior plans go awry.