A Collaborative Service Provider Platform for Handyman Services

Abstract

Nigeria's population is growing at an unprecedented pace of 2.4 percent yearly, boosting the demand for a handyman. Although Nigeria has a thriving informal sector comprised of part-time or freelance handypersons, the country's economy needs to be structured at the national level to offer users excellent service. The unorganized informal sector has made access to handyperson services more challenging, specifically when traveling or moving to a new location. Service providers are spread out over different locations and provide varied pricing, quality, and types of services. Existing solutions to this issue need to be more cohesive, offering contacts spread throughout the internet, some of which need to be more genuine and wind up being fraudsters acting as handyman providers. Hence, this research aims to develop a platform where all handyman service providers can showcase their services, and clients can quickly request and hire one. To achieve the work, an iteration model was employed, the design was created using Draw.io, HTML, CSS, BOOTSTRAP, and JAVASCRIPT to develop the application layer, business logic was constructed using PHP, and Mysql was used for the back end. The application was hosted and deployed for evaluation. Questionnaires were used to capture users' opinions after interacting with the application, and the results proved that the application provides accessible communication between the handyman and those requiring their services.