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Yes, there’s an app for that

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By on Tech

Whether it’s a studying app or a relationship app, Peep: The Study App and Crushh are two new apps that will benefit college students. Peep, created by Luke Klepec of Xavier University, is a study app that will benefit stressed college students. Crushh, created by Es Lee of New York, analyzes someone’s interest in you via text.

Interview with Luke Klepec:
MK: Tell us a bit about the app.
LK: Peep is a mobile app in development designed to enhance the overall productivity of college students. Upon signing up, users will have the ability to ‘hide in their shell’ and fend off all other mobile distractions by initiating personalized productivity interval timers. When the user is done with a study interval, they will have the ability to ‘peep’ back out of their shell for a small period of time in order to check all of their social media notifications they received while they were in that interval. Once the user has finished their entire productivity session, they will be assigned a productivity score based on how often they peeped out of their shell to access other distracting apps while they were supposed to be in a study interval. Users will also be prompted to enter their respective course and professor tags in order to pair with other students working on the same assignment or studying for the same thing at that given time for immediate academic assistance. 
MK: What inspired you to create this? 
LK: I came up with the idea of Peep: The Study App because I realized that the current generation of college students is hyper-connected. There is a plethora of social media platforms that many of us mindlessly and habitually scroll through for hours on end each day. I fell into this trap one too many times by the time I realized that this was a true threat to our productivity. I would end up spending two hours on an assignment that should have only taken one hour because of likes, comments and snap streaks. If you have a test tomorrow that you need to study for, and your friends are begging you to hang out tonight, utilizing Peep to encourage distraction-free studying will essentially help you get the best of both worlds.
MK: What do you hope users get out of the experience of the app?
LK: Several students experience a culture shock upon first coming to college. For many of us, it is the first time that we are fully responsible for ourselves and are on our own when it comes to being as resourceful as we can. Many of us did not develop healthy study habits in high school, nor do we know many of the people in our classes to help us if we need immediate academic assistance at first. In using Peep, students will no longer have to look up other individuals on their class roster, find them on Facebook, add them, message them and wait for their response when you can’t figure out the answer to #17 on the study guide at 1:00 a.m. the night before a 8:00 a.m. exam. Productivity is the perfect balance between collaboration and independence. Peep is productivity, and that is exactly how I want it to be seen to our users.
Interview with Es Lee:
MK: Tell us a bit about the app.

EL: Crushh is an Android app that analyzes text messages and lets the user know how much the people they text like them… secretly. The app analyzes text messages (already on the phone, so there’s nothing to import) as well as call logs to arrive at a score indicating who likes who more, and other relative measurements. A user selects contacts on the phone and within seconds of hitting the button to analyze, the app comes back with a score rating the parity of the relationships on a five-point scale. A score of 5 means the contact likes the user much more and a 0 means the user likes the contact a lot more. A 2.5 means they like each other equally. The contact will never even know the user has analyzed their exchanges (thus the “shh” in Crushh).

MK: What inspired you to create this?

EL: The idea started from a conversation with a friend about dating in New York. He just moved to the city and was pretty confused by the texting game here. There was one girl he thought he clicked with but he was getting mixed signals in her texts. I looked through the text chain and could tell she liked him. I’d seen my share of confusing texting behavior here to start getting a good read on the “body language.” I figured whatever my thought process was could be converted into algorithms. So after many, many iterations, we think we have some pretty smart algorithms that can help the app think like a human does.

MK: What do you hope users get out of the experience of the app?

EL: I’m glad you asked this question. There may be a fair share of people who will use the app and think we’re just wrong (we’re far from perfect) or don’t want to see the truth about someone, especially if it’s someone they like. But our goal is mainly to reduce miscommunication, which is on the rise we rely more on texting in our relationships. We’re making a tool for people to better communicate and better understand how they may come across to other people. Sure, everyone wants a high score (meaning the other person likes you more) but the goal should be an equal relationship. If you really like someone and the app is showing a high score, it means you should try harder to reciprocate. We really just want to give people visibility on their relationships, so they can know where to focus their efforts. Over time, we hope to be making people better texters.

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