🚗 Building a Car Pool App: Problem Definition
When our office at Persona moved into the middle of no-where, it took me 1 hour and a half from door-to-door to get into the office; and a similar time for my colleagues. One of my colleagues decided it would be best if he got his driving licence and a car to get us to work and back.
This car journey involved three pickups, so Chris would post in our work WhatsApp group to tell us when he’s on his way. As I was the first pickup, I would wait for him to tell me when he’s near and then when he has arrived. After I’m in, I would post in the WhatsApp group when we are at the next pickup, and so on.
While this journey is fairly uniform, the one thing that would cause confusion was the traffic levels. If there is any traffic that prevents Chris from picking us up from around the normal time, then we would normally have to post in the WhatsApp group. If I, or the other pickup is in the car, then we can answer it — however, if Chris is alone and driving, he cannot respond.
So the problem is that when it takes longer than normal to be picked up, the driver has no way to express the problem and pickups have no way of knowing.
I decided to try to tackle this problem!
