Let's Goal

Feeling dehydrated? Tired? Demotivated? What if you could upgrade your lifestyle -- right alongside your friends? Introducing Let's Goal, a habit tracking app combining self-care with community.

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Inspiration

We are all hackers here – we know more than anyone that healthy levels of sleep, activity, and hydration can be tough to keep track of. Driven by our own, and our friends’ experiences around personal accountability in self-care, we worked together to engineer a dynamic, creative solution catered towards youth and young adults.

After starting the hackathon with ideas around healthcare and social media, we decided to create a user-friendly solution that would incorporate both themes. We took inspiration from social fitness tracking apps like Strava, where you can log a running distance with friends and compare your stats, as well as habit tracking apps like Waterllama, which make use of fun and engaging graphics to encourage healthy levels of water intake. Drawing inspiration from the systems that worked for applications like these, we worked towards the best of both worlds – a social self-care tracker that allows friendly inter-user competition.

What it does

Let’s Goal allows you and your friends to set daily goals and track your progress for self-care activities including water intake, hours of sleep, and number of steps. With a leaderboard ranked by personal progress, you can keep yourself and your friends accountable in a fun, engaging way while encouraging the development of healthy personal habits. After all, we've all heard of gym buddies -- for many of us, it's easy to stay motivated when training with a friend. Why not build onto that and make all self care social?

How we built it

We started with using Canva to collaboratively create basic frameworks for the structure of our design, and then implemented engaging graphics, including water flow animations, to the frontend with Krita, JavaScript, and CSS. Then, we learned how to set up a cloud database with MongoDB, and integrated it with Node.js to allow the configuration of data through the front-end portion of the site.

Challenges we ran into

Since databases and other backend technology were very new to us, we faced some challenges in setting up our backend data hosting and learning about different cloud technologies with limited background information. We also needed to learn about connecting front-end processes to the back-end aspect of our project, including the interfacing of MongoDB to Node.js in VSCode.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a social site from scratch within the time constraint of one weekend was a huge achievement for our team. On the front-end side, we were able to create a dynamic and unique visual component with our combined expertise in graphics and design implementation. On the back-end side, by weighing the pros and cons of different cloud services, and conducting extensive research on the deployment and data configuration of a new database, we challenged ourselves and created a project that everyone can feel proud of.

What we learned

With three first-time hackers in our team, we learned a lot about the process of ideating and creating a project within a short period of time, as well as general technical research and troubleshooting skills for technologies and platforms new to us such as MongoDB and Node.js. We learned how to create new databases and connect them to relevant shell and GUI programs for different contributors’ computers, as well as how to configure and add new data through the frontend side.

What's next for Let's Goal

We plan to create an app version of Let’s Goal to make it more accessible for users to input data, especially when they are on the go.

We would also like to add more advanced functionality to Let’s Goal. Features such as smart watch data integration and overall community statistics would provide a more comprehensive and user-friendly experience, with automatic updates to your self-care goal progress as well as a way to view how well a friend group is performing overall. Adding a log of updates from “friended” users, with emoticon reaction features (similar to the “like” feature for Instagram stories) would also be a fun addition that would further motivate people to meet their goals.

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