< Projects

YonBbu

Mar. 2019 - June 2019

With: Soomin Kim, Eunsuh Jin, Jiho Lee

“… thoughtful designers have worked to make our lives easier and smoother.”
– The Design of everyday things, Don Norman, p11

Mosquitos are perhaps one of the smallest creatures we encounter. However, when one is in your room right before sleeping, its presence can feel like an elephant. Like this, small nuisances can create big frustrations in our life.

What our team aimed to achieve was to enhance quality of life by solving a trivial yet ubiquitous problem. This ‘goal’ led our team to come up with the idea of ‘YonBBu – Yonsei, do me a favor!’. Examining everyday life, a long line waiting for M6724 bus caught our attention. Since 2014, Yonsei University students have been traveling back and forth between two campuses - Sinchon and Songdo. This is a ‘Yonsei exclusive inconvenience’ that causes burden to students. Songdo has relatively deficient transportation system, and the number of shuttle bus provided by the university is limited.

Even if there would have been a excellent transportation, it still leaves the fact that a student has to physically go to the other campus in person, even when the business is something that can be done within 5 minutes. From this observation, we extended the problem area to a more general scope - having to do a trivial task in an inconvenient way can be extremely annoying. In addition, due to busy schedule, university students sometimes do not have the physical time to do even a small task by themselves.

On the other hand, there is rather a clear solution to this problem - make someone else do it. In fact, a person has a higher chance of finding a stranger who shares similar daily routine within or around the campus. However, Yonsei students still find it hard to ask someone else to do a simple favor. For example, it is quite tough for someone who is already in Veritas B to ask one stranger among the “floating population” around UML to bring a cup of coffee on the way. This fact brought the idea of ‘a simple, accessible and impartial platform that legitimizes finding someone else to do trivial errands instead’, giving a life to our platform, “YonBBu”.

The basic concept of YonBBu is following:
A. It will allow the students to ask other students to do them a favor, and the students will be able to help others with a reward.
B. This application will only be available to Yonsei university students.

The basic mechanism of YonBBu can be described into the following steps:

1. A person uploads a request on YonBBu with the detailed description and the promised reward for the accepter.
2. YonBBu will give a push alarm to other users who are near the location.
3. If one of the users who received the push alarm accepts the request, YonBBu will notify the original uploader that his or her request has been accepted.
4. The user who is buying or bringing the item will be rewarded when it is verified that the item has been successfully delivered to the requester.