Coming Up
I was in Chicago last Friday night. It had been an abnormally busy week. I hadn’t seen my friends in a while, but we had been talking over the course of the last 24 hours about how we needed to do something fun, take our minds off of school and take advantage of this awesome city that our overbooked schedules often caused us to ignore. The problem was, we didn’t quite know what to do.
By Friday afternoon, when the group of us finally came up for air, the idea of sifting through website after website to find the perfect event to attend seemed daunting. We did search for about an hour or so, but by 8:30 we turned hungry and apathetic. There was too much to look through, and the majority of it didn’t appeal to us. We ended up heading over to a nearby sushi restaurant. We stopped by the patio of one of our frequented bars and then called it an early night.
It was a nice time with friends, but when we woke up the next morning we learned that while we had been reliving the same Friday night we had rehashed time and time again, there had been an eclectic neighborhood festival a few El stops away. One of our favorite female comedians had even performed in town and the tickets had been surprisingly inexpensive. Needless to say, we were disappointed. Our Friday anticipated night had again fizzled, but it wasn’t due to a lack of events in the city. The problem was that we didn’t have the time or ability to find them.
Nights like these are the reason why my group mates and I chose to create Coming Up: a mobile event aggregator for those who want to know what’s going on around them. We were tired of missing out on events around us because searching for them was too time consuming.
Coming Up cuts down the time a user would invest searching for the perfect event.
Rather than searching for hours on various websites, with a couple of swipes users can learn what sporting, food and entertainment events are happening around them on any given day. Traditionally, these different types of events would be hosted on different event platforms, but Coming Up consolidates those lists to provide a completely mobile one-stop event-browsing destination.
In order to create this aggregation of events, our team used the APIs from three event websites: Eventful, Eventbrite and Meetup. Using the user’s latitude and longitude, the app makes a request to each of the APIs for events happening near them. This provided us with more information than we knew what to do with.
In order to present these results to the user in the clearest way, we standardized this information. Now for each event posting on the Coming Up app you will simply see the event title, a photo for the event, time and place, a brief description and a link. For further clarity, we categorized events into sports, food, entertainment and featured lists, standardizing the categories provided from the original APIs.
These results were sorted into four main category pages. Users can swipe through these pages and see a list of all of the events on the three sites that we aggregated the information from. Users can then scroll through the list, expand descriptions and click on links to learn which events near them they want to attend.
If a user is interested in an event, he or she can simply click our “Like This” button, which will save that event to a separate “Liked Events” page. Users will no longer have to remember which events they were interested in and where to find them again. By opening the Liked Events page, located at the bottom of the mobile screen, users will see which events they were interested in listed in chronological order. The user will now have a narrower selection to choose from, again making it easier to quickly find the right event and start enjoying it.
At the moment our app performs each of these features, but we hope to expand it in order to present our users with a personally tailored list of events.
But some challenges set us back a few steps in the process.
One major difficulty we found was that there are a variety of methods that different websites use to store events. Ideally, we would find events from Facebook, major event websites and even city websites, but each website organizes its data differently.
Another challenge that we faced was building an app for a mobile platform. None of us had ever built a mobile app and this was a learning experience for all. We started off trying several possible systems, like Xamarin, Meteor and Ionic and eventually settled with Ionic. Ionic had adequate support online and provided a nice structure to build off of. However, none of us had ever used AngularJS and there was a bit of a learning curve there. We went back and forth over if we should use a server to store all of the events that we received from the websites’ APIs or not. We ended up not storing the data and instead decided to retrieve the information every time the user opens the app.
When originally conceptualizing Coming Up, we had hoped to be able to use the like feature to learn from our users. Like Pandora or Spotify does with music, we wanted each like to give us a better idea of what type of events and level of engagement our user preferred. We wanted not only for Coming Up to be able to tell us not only if the user like sports, but if she preferred watching sports or playing sports. Throughout the conceptualization process we realized that category of events is not the only way to sort. There is a difference between users who want to watch a movie and those who want to meet with others and discuss a movie. The app ideally would learn how active and involved its user typically likes to be in the event and would show the user more events that we deemed similar or involved the same standard of participation. We were not able to accomplish this goal in the 10 weeks of this project, but this is our largest goal moving forward. We believe that this will truly set our product apart in order to best provide our users with a list of personally tailored events they would enjoy.
In the future…
we would also like to add other smaller features like a search function and caching. Ultimately for this app to be successful, we also would like to include the APIs of a multitude of other event websites. This would ensure that we are providing the user a complete list of events nearby so he or she could truly eliminate those less-than-exciting Friday nights.
