Project Term: Winter 2018

As a second iteration through the ACE Project Space, the Tooliaba project sought to create more functionality for this sharing economy style service website. Tooliaba’s goal is to satisfy a niche of users who can rent the hardware tools they own out to others and also rent tools they don’t have.

The driving reason behind the Tooliaba project is that many people have tools that go largely unused, perhaps they purchased them for a one-time do-it-yourself project. Whatever the reason, tools are expensive to purchase. As a tool owner, why not recuperate some of the purchase costs? As a renter, you may only need a tool for a day and neither want to purchase the tool or prefer to put the cost of renting a tool into your neighbor’s pocket instead of a big box store’s rental service. The Tooliaba site seeks to connect these users together.

Our students took on a number of tasks during this project. Working with an existing codebase, they familiarized themselves with the existing solution and worked on fixing existing bugs in the website and implementing a new redesign of the website including making the site responsive. It is worth mentioning, that this project benefitted from the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) expertise from a team of Creative Arts students. Collaborations like this really help our students realize the value of UI/UX on technology projects and see how they bring value to each other’s roles. Thank you to Creative Arts for this opportunity.

Our students also developed a series of new features for the site functionality. A new messaging system lets users connect with each other and clarify ambiguities, a new payment procedure facilitates payment processing through the website. They also fashioned a request, accept, and denial system for users to confirm rental requests.

For the admins, our team created a back-end portal where administrators can edit user roles. The Tooliaba site is also now complete with a fully functional WYSIWYG blog and an FAQ page.

Technologies used: Mailgun, CodeIgniter, jQuery, Visio, Balsamiq, Bootstrap

Tooliaba site Messages Page

Tooliaba site Tool Rental Page

Tooliaba site Tool Search Page