We are developing this app in order to solve the problem of how expensive it is to buy new textbooks. Students have a limited budget, and students spend a lot of money every semester on textbooks. Also, once students buy the textbooks, it is very difficult to find good deals when selling them back. Companies and big bookstores tend to rip students off and buy their books for very low prices. Also with coronavirus it can be more difficult to connect with people in your classes and major. Moreover, there is no existing platform for trading, selling, or buying used textbooks among students, especially among Virginia Tech students. By creating something new, we will solve the problems mentioned earlier and make the lives of students at Virginia Tech easier by saving them time and money.
We plan to leverage Views and Layouts and UI elements by making multiple different screens and incorporating images of the books through a scroll view layout. UI elements we will be using are search bar, filters for searching up books or classes, categories, and more. We will be using what we learned in activities and intents to be able to send data/information that the user inputs into the app and across the multiple screens. These multiple screens will consist of the home page, a scrolling/search page for used books, a screen for sellers to post books to sell, and possibly more as we continue to develop the app and its use idea. Lastly, we plan to leverage data handling by allowing a potential Buyer to find their desired books by searching a database and buy from the seller by contacting him/her through their posted contact info. There will not be a direct payment option through the app.
The scope of our project is very simple. We wish to target our app to VT students who want to buy and sell old textbooks, so hopefully, they can either save some money while buying or make back some of their money while selling. Our main goal is to streamline the searching process for used books into an easy-to-use app. By congregating most Virginia Tech students onto one app, we hope that it will serve as a tool to help our primary users find the necessary textbooks for the majority of the classes offered at Virginia Tech in a simpler and cheaper way than buying new ones. Students will be able to customize their prices to what they think is fair for the condition of their book and specify tags to label the books, such as what class they got it for, the material subject, the condition of the book, and so forth. As an added bonus we hope to connect many Virginia Tech students through this app because users will have a chance to communicate with students in their major or those who have taken a specific class previously. We want our app to be helpful to all VT Students.
https://www.figma.com/file/rrmLAvG9ROYZQr7z4bgHBc/Login-Screen?node-id=105%3A463