WaterlooWash

Inspiration

We (Eric and Ryan) have had some crazy issues using laundry spaces in Waterloo. From flooded washers to waiting for over an hour for a free dryer at 3 AM, we've experienced it all. Because of this trauma, we really wanted to make an app that solves our issues. Doing laundry is such a mundane, boring, and oftentimes a time-wasting task, especially for first years. With our app, we "gamified" the chore of laundry, turning it into an interactive, community-based platform to improve communication, and most importantly save time.

What it does

On WaterlooWash, you can see which washers and dryers are available at any laundry space in UW, at any time. When you put a load into a machine, you can "claim" a machine, updating across all devices to reflect the change. Likewise, you can set timers for automatic notifications when the cleaning process is nearly complete, and you can see and ping individuals who have clothes in the washer but haven't come to pick them up/there was an error during the washing process.

How we built it

We used Figma and Figma Make, and used pixel art for the visual effects, employing apps like Adobe and using photo -> gif convertors to help us give the app more variety and depth.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was definitely the learning curve of Figma itself. Neither of us were experts going in, so understanding how to even use the platform on the first place was very confusing at the start. Also, Figma Make was finicky at times. sometimes it worked perfectly, and other times it completely broke out design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our UI setup, as we believe that it's informative without overloading the user of unimportant information. We're also proud of the idea of pinging/notifying individuals that haven't picked up their laundry, as well as the idea of rating a machine for future users to know which ones are riskier to use than others.

What we learned

We mainly learned all about the Figma design process. We learned how to make shapes, edit text, add lines, format pages, prompt Make, and more.

What's next for WaterlooWash

We hope to further implement the backend for the website, as most buttons are there for visual aspects and do not yet store information/dynamically update when machines are claimed/individuals are pinged , etc.