aligned.space

Supporting, promoting, and protecting the health of individuals in female, nonbinary, and queer spaces.

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Who we are

Hi! We're Cami, Caroline, and Crista (aka The Three Musk-C-teers) and we're three sophomores from MIT who wanted to try our hand at a hackathon! We're all extremely passionate about social good, tech, and inclusivity.

Where the idea came from

While browsing the topics, we saw there was a lot of prizes focused on inclusivity and health. We wanted to build an app that centered on these topics. As a result, we tried to identify spaces within healthcare that lacked inclusivity, until we realized that healthcare as a whole is a really, really scary topic for many of our genderqueer and noncis friends. Once we realized this, we immediately knew we wanted to create an app that worked to uplift this part of the community and we settled on aligned, an app meant for LGBTQ+ folks to share their experiences with healthcare professionals and clinics to identify which locations are safest for them to utilize.

What it does

At aligned.space, we believe that an individual’s sense of safety, inclusion, and acceptance are key to any healthcare experience. Our platform seeks to provide members of the LGBTQ+ community with better clarity about the health spaces around them. Through our anonymous rating interface, users can assess local practices share their personal experiences in order to find the treatment options which best align with their needs.

Search for providers: Find queer friendly healthcare professionals in our community generated database.

Add a review: Submit a rating and additional tags to help other users better find healthcare providers that fit their needs.

Resources: Access a worksheet that can be used to quickly provide doctors with information to be aware of, national queer health resources, and a community forum where individuals can anonymously source help.

How it was built

We knew immediately we wanted to start with a Figma, knowing that if we weren't able to code things in time, it's good to have a nice, solid Figma to present. We spent a lot of time ideating different features, such as anonymous authentification, review submissions, filtering systems, and more. Obviously, we were pretty ambitious and there's still a lot we want to do with this but weren't quite able to squeeze in 24 hours.

Simultaneously, with the Figma, Cami started building the skeleton of our web app in case we had time to work on it. The web app is built using React and Bootstrap, deployed with Heroku.

What problems we faced

Time was definitely not our friend, as we all just finished up our first week of school and had a sundry of assignments and conflicting events to work through. We tried our hardest to work when we could together but those conflicting events definitely took a toll on our project!

We also ran into a couple Figma issues in terms of organization, as well as a strange glitch with Figma icons where if they're not in a frame, they remove the fixed formatting on certain pages. We had a lot of trouble figuring out why certain things were not stickying, and it turns out, a couple random floating magnifying glasses were the source.

Stretch Goals

We definitely wish we had the time to implement the back-end. We planned to use Google Maps API alongside Firebase for database management, and it would be really cool to be able to build upon this app later on since we think it's a really cool idea!

And of course, we'd have loved more time to actually build the app fully!

What we learned

Cami: I'm really happy I got the chance to practice more Bootstrap and React things. I had such a fun time formatting everything. I definitely got a LOT more familiar with Figma and got really creative with how I had to lay things out.

Caroline: I got a great crash course into how Figma and Firebase worked and learned a lot from working with my team about the process of putting together a web app, from designing to deploying!

Crista: Because my background is traditionally in code, I was quite excited for the opportunity to explore the design process and hone my ability in tools such as Figma and Adobe Photoshop. Attending workshops on concepts such as UI/UX and programming browser extensions provided me with the opportunity to learn useful new skills. Moreover, I loved getting to collaborate with my team to develop an app that addresses a real-world problem in healthcare.

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