AutoShyfter

An Automatic Scheduling System for social good with a large focus on UX and HCI

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Inspiration

After running through hundreds of shift scheduling software online and having worked in industries that have used these old software systems our team felt we could do better, and we did. I'm happy to introduce AutoShyfter, the best workplace scheduling system on Earth. We believe that shift scheduling shouldn't be more pain than it's worth and that finding an optimal shift schedule for employees should be more data-focused to ensure fairness and provide a helping hand with employee health thereby improving business efficiency and customer happiness. With countless hours spent on Human-Computer Interaction research and UX design methodologies, our team was not only able to prototype what the system could look like but also build it within 24 hours!

What it does

One of the world's most well-designed and easy to use automatic scheduler platforms for small and large businesses. Notifies Employees through Twilio about shift scheduling changes.

How we built it

We used a design first approach by splitting our group of four into teams of two. After the initial team kick off and stage checkpoints. Ralph focused on System Design, Tarek focused on creating a low fidelity mockup and Mohammad and Frederick started building out the backend systems according to the design specifications / mostly project/server set up. Once the System Design was complete, Mohammad and Frederick raced through the implementation while Ralph and Tarek converted the low fidelity prototype into a high fidelity one. We spent half the team's time on design and half the team's time on technology. After the Design was complete Tarek created a logo and promotional material for the project while Ralph and Frederick began to code the front end interface. Mohammad then integrated Twilio and stabilized the back end systems for production-ready deployment.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing feature integration and UX design was a hard challenge. Every single feature discussion was a mix between we need to have it versus we need to keep the UI clean. We did very innovative design strategies to get every single feature requested into the design while keeping the interface clean. Due to the complexity of the System Design, we also had some trouble with the back end implementation as GraphQL seemed to be more complex when working with MongoDB Stitch for the first time due to the event listeners not working seamlessly with how we envisioned the system to work. This was mostly our fault and we stayed up Sunday night to pick up the roadblocks and move them out of the way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that the design turned out as beautifully as it did as it's a professional looking design with a strong focus on UX. It's our first time spending so many hours on design, contextual language, color theory etc that we did not expect the product to come to the level that it came out to in such a short amount of time. This truly shows the innovative nature of hackathons and what 4 students with a passion for technology can achieve. Not only that but we were able to implement a working version of the solution with a live backend hosted as well!

What we learned

We learned a lot about design, project management, and MongoDB / SASS. We are very proud of how far as a team we have come and look forward to participating in future hackathons as a team and more importantly building amazing software that can impact future generations!

What's next for AutoShyfter

We will be building out the project further after the hackathon ends as we did not expect to come so far and we definitely want to see it through all the way to the end (More refinements to perfect the project are left) and we are very excited as the technical and design challenges are hard but with a bit of learning not out of our reach! Thank you MHacks for the amazing hackathon and for allowing us to meet each other at the event and work together throughout the event!

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