The problem NoQ solves

During this Covid-19 Pandemic, it is advised to avoid gatherings and avoid contacting with people as it can lead to an increase in spread of the disease. People follow social distancing when they go for essential commodities shopping, this leads to long waiting lines outside the shops.Thus the customers had to wait outside with a large number of people thus increasing the risk of contracting the virus. It also led to discomfort among customers, and difficulty in managing these lines when multiple such shops were close by or had limited space outside their shops. NoQ app – ‘Say No to Queues’ developed by team Dejaavu solves this problem of gathering in queues.
NoQ app is a Progressive Web App made using Flask framework. Customers are given a provision to book a slot in the available slots for a shop. When booked, the customers receive an auto-generated message of confirmation using Twilio API. This message acts as a ticket to enter the shop. Each slot is decided to have timings and maximum number of people according to the size of the shop, this helps avoid overcrowding. The customers are shown the inventory of items available in each shop, which is filled in by the shopkeeper. Another benefit of NoQ app is that, we can keep a track of the people that were in the shop at a specific time, this helps to find the spread of the virus if found that a person was a carrier of the virus, thus tracking the possible affected people becomes easy.
An alternative solution to implement social distancing is doorstep delivery which will reduce the no of people gathering at places like shop fronts. However, doorstep delivery is not feasible looking at the current scenario. Migrant workers returning to their villages and towns has led to a reduce in logistic manpower required as delivery people. Also, people are scared of taking delivery jobs due to the fear of contacting an unknown infected person.The solution provided by us is also very feasible and easy to implement.

Challenges we ran into

1.Shops in a particular locality might be open on a specific days. Hence the slots for the day needed to be declared a day before atleast for customers to book slots.So the shops were needed to be dynamically displayed.We overcame this hurdle by using Jinja2 templating engine which provides logical expressions and thus hepled us display shops dynamically.
2.Also the opening and closing time for each shop would be different and thus the number of slots would be different for each shop.Jinja2 again helped in this task by looping through the start and end time and displaying slots of that shop for the particular day.
3.To ensure that only the customer who has booked the slot gets access at the particular time authentiaction was required ,we handled that using OTP feature i.e. sending a One Time Password to the registered mobile number of the customer booking the slot in a given duration.The customer was needed to show this OTP while entering the shop.This was done using Twilio API.
4.It won't be desirable for the customer to visit the shop and notice items he wanted to buy were out of stock.So we added a Customise Items tab where the items can be tracked live by the customer .This list would be updated by the shopkeeper after certain intervals of time. So the customer can decide which items to buy according to their avalibility in the shop.
5.In todays world people use devices ranging from laptops to smatrphones, hence the site was to be made responive so that any user acccessing the app from his device would be comfortable. Hence the site was made responsive withextensive use of Bootstrap and Javascript functionality.Also to give the user native app like experience the website was further converted into a Progressibve Web App so that the customer could access it easily form his or her device rahther than visiting the site URL repeatedly.