View our website here or visit https://leokwo.github.io/buddy.io/ with your browser.
2021 marks another year under the influence of COVID-19. As international students, we found it particularly challenging to meet and connect with others both due to language barriers and health-related concerns. We understand and value the importance of friendship, especially during stressful times like a pandemic. We hope that, with Buddy.io, we will be able to alleviate some of that stress by connecting people and supporting an online community where resources, information, and help are only a few taps away.
We identified the following challenges of friend-making, and community-binding during a pandemic:
- People are concerned about COVID-19
- In-person face-to-face communication may not be accepted by everyone in a community
- Language barriers are hurdles to effective communication
- For international students, information on transportation, housing, grocery shopping is not readily available via simple Google searches. Not to mention many students are also confused about vaccination requirements, cultural differences, and local practices, etc.
To tackle these problems, Buddy.io will provide these features(not set in stone yet):
- Buddy.io is specifically designed to serve local communities. As of right now, we plan to create separate online spaces based on the user’s enrolled college. Hence, there will be a Buddy.io space for Syracuse University and a separate space for New York University, etc.
- Users can register using their email addresses. They will be asked to select their school and create a user profile, that is used to recommend people and groups that may interest them.
- Buddy.io will have a recommendation page where the user can find people, groups, and activities to connect with.
- Once they are connected with people, groups, and/activities, they send messages, post useful information, and/or set up appointments with others.
- For messaging, community posts, etc. Buddy.io is planning to have built-in features to help users translate foreign words into English.
- Buddy.io allows users to share stories/experiences of what it is like living, studying, and working around the Campus area. Oftentimes, the best information comes from someone with a similar experience. These posts will be called Buddy Experiences and will be an essential part of content sharing on the platform.
- Buddy.io will allow users to ask for a NightWalkRequest with verified college students/police officers.
- Buddy.io will allow users to ask and answer academic-specific questions in a course-number-categorized Question/Answers section.
- Buddy.io will allow users to connect with student housing companies and other students looking to sublease their apartments.
- Buddy.io will provide a RateMyProfessor system, with an exhaustive list of all professors and TAs in that college for students to easily rate their experiences taking the class and share information on how to succeed in the course.
Different from other social apps, Buddy.io is laser-focused on serving our college student user base. We believe everyone attending colleges should get the most out of this amazing opportunity. We want to empower their dreams and help them achieve their goals by providing a dedicated social space that is designed with college life in mind. With handy features like Buddy Experience, RateMyProfessor, and NightWalkRequest, Buddy.io is uniquely equipped to support students and family members with up-to-date information, and safety-oriented tools.
College students! From undergraduates to graduates, we believe every student can find a place on Buddy.io. What’s more? During the idealization process of Buddy.io, we thought we may be able to deliver a great experience for college faculty and employees as well. Although we do need to slightly modify the feature set we provide for this target user base. But for now, we are laser-focused on providing college students the best experience they deserve.
The scope of Buddy.io is not set in stone yet. We may add or remove features in the future. But for now, we think there are several key functionalities that Buddy.io cannot live without:
- User Signup and Profile Creation
- Account information
- College the user is attending
- Personal interests/hobbies/preferences
- BuddyExperience
- Posts should support media such as text, pictures, videos(possibly)
- Should allow other users to interact with the post
- Like
- Comment
- Star
- Recommend Friends
- Based on the user’s personal interests/hobbies/preferences
- Can either like or dislike
- If two students both liked each other, they will be notified and will be able to connect via a built-in chat service(may be technically difficult to implement)
- Q/A Functionality
- Students will be able to ask/answer coursework based questions
- These questions are categorized by course number for easy reference
- NightWalkRequest
- Request at any time to have other students or officers accompanied with
- Encourage students to form a walk-to-home group
- Send SOS message immediately
- RateMyProfessor
- Building a list of professors with their teaching courses from the college website/
- Allowing students to rate their professors and leave comments in an anonymous way.
- Using a weighted average to calculate points. “Liked” comments are weighed higher.
For all functions mentioned above, we believe they are feasible. Java provides all kinds of packages to support recommendation algorithms, database connectivity. For practicality, Buddy.io focuses on serving college students and meeting their needs. Functions like NightWalkRequest and RateMyProfessor may likely be of interest to most students.
This website may not be able to function properly due to us utilizing localhost as our server. Here are some screenshots of the websites:
