ℹ️Category Submission: COVID-19 Communications
Inspiration
COVID-19 global panic buying has emptied shelves of basic staples in all supermarkets, leaving families, high risk groups and individuals without access to the most basic needs.
Supply chains are implementing measures to increase their stock levels and safety protocols but fear of shortages of food and services are making their stock on site fluctuate every week and supermarkets become high-risk infection areas.
What it does
Trovado is a platform that helps users optimise their visit to the supermarket, by informing them about item availability in their nearest shops, while reducing their exposure to the virus, eliminating unnecessary movements to risk areas.
How we built it
User research to 60 people from different parts of the world.
Stock levels:
- Toilet paper, yeast, rice, flour, bread, tins of preserved food, hand sanitiser and other cleaning products are the main items people have been having trouble finding in their local supermarket.
- Paracetamol, masks and gloves have been sold out in pharmacies.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE):
- 67% of people that go to the supermarket/pharmacy at least once a week don't have any PPE.
- 19% of people only have gloves.
- 7% of people only have masks.
- 4% of people have both masks and gloves.
- 3% of people have full PPE.
Exposure frequency of risk groups:
- 32% of people went to the supermarket/pharmacy more than twice in a week.
- People with no PPE went shopping x1.87 times more than people with some protective equipment.
- People with no PPE went shopping 1.11 times per week on average, while people with some PPE went 0.59 times per week on average.
Define & Develop
Based on this data, we know the majority of people are trying to limit their visits to supermarkets - yet not being able to find their basic staples in-store, force them to go several times in a week.
We need to provide users safer and optimised shopping experiences, helping them find their desired items, while lowering the amount of trips to supermarkets/pharmacies.
- We need to search for the data that will generate stock levels.
- We want to integrate a map that shows stores near user's location and filter them by item availability.
- We want to show the traffic of people that are currently in-store to avoid waiting times and crowds.
- We want to allow users to save their time slot for visiting the supermarket/pharmacy and notify them when their booking is upcoming or if other time slots free up using
Twilio Programmable SMS. This way we can ensure a better distribution of influx of customers in-store. - We want to verify user's account using
Twilio Verify.
How can we offer reliable real-time stock levels information?
Our users can become active contributors, updating stock levels helping the next customers. There are 2 touchpoints where this can happen:
A. Directly from the map, selecting the store and stock levels that users want to update.
B. We can prompt a short questionnaire to users during or after their saved time slot visit.We can implement gamification with badges to 🌟top trusted contributors.
We can add an account for shop owners to manage their own stock levels. We can incentivise their onboarding by supporting their economy, driving our users to their shops 💪.
Challenges we ran into
- Retrieving data from Google maps Popular times.
- Not sleeping much.
- Making sure the stock availability is true and updated frequently.
- Identifying users that have recently been in a supermarket and ask them about the availability of certain items.
- Reaching out to the elder community.
- Trying not to get overwhelmed by the COVID-19 emergency and all the needed features and build a MVP.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Contributing to open source projects.
- Helping any way we can to fight the COVID-19 outbreak with our resources and skills.
- Working remotely as a team in self-isolation.
What we learned
- More people than we thought are frequently exposed to high-risk areas.
- Even though supply chains keep increasing their stock levels, the most essential products are still sold out.
- TailwindUI is awesome when you need to build fast.
- We can add more than one language now.
- Getting user's location based on user's ip address and geolocation.
- Filtering the amount of markers loaded on the map based on user's location.
- Sending SMS with
Twilio Programmable SMSto different countries!
What's next for Trovado
- Adding a chat or form where people can request item availability of a product that we are not currently tracking and match them with someone who is in store or will be in store soon.
- Retrieving data from social media trends and news to predict the next most demanded products. This way we can help shops reduce their losses from over stocking and foresee new demands.
- Help supermarkets analyse and predict users behaviours by neighbourhoods.
- Understand shops needs better so we can help them provide a safer experience for their clients and workers: Can we connect their in-store pickup purchases with our users? Can we help shops that have no online presence?
- Scale the website to a global level and add more languages.🌍
- Keep on testing!
Built With
twilio programmable sms twilio verifyfirebase gridsome
abstract figma mapbox openstreetmaps sketch tailwindui
Try it out 🎉
https://trovado.now.sh
https://github.com/hacknug/trovado
Thank you!❤️ We are:
👨💻@hack_nug Full Stack developer
👩💻@hanseo Product Designer
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