Inspiration
We were inspired by the resilience of freelancers, particularly creative designers, during the pandemic. As students, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and not value our own work. We wanted to empower emerging designers and remind them of what we can do with a little bit of courage. And support.
What it does
Bossify is a mobile app that cleverly helps students adjust their design fees. It focuses on equitable upfront pay, which in turn increases the amount of money saved. This can be put towards an emergency fund. On the other side, clients can receive high-quality, reliable work. The platform has a transparent rating system making it easy to find quality freelancers.
It's a win-win situation.
How we built it
We got together as a team the first night to hammer out ideas. This was our second idea, and everyone on the team loved it. We all pitched in ideas for product strategy. Afterwards, we divided the work into two parts - 1) Userflows, UI Design, & Prototype; 2) Writing and Testing the Algorithm.
For the design, Figma was the main software used. The designers (Lori and Janice) used a mix iOS components and icons for speed. Stock images were taken from Unsplash and Pexels. After quickly drafting the storyboards, we created a rapid prototype. Finally, the pitch deck was made to synthesize our ideas.
For the code, Android studio was the main software used. The developers (Eunice and Zoe) together implemented the back and front-end of the MVP (minimum viable product), where Zoe developed the intelligent price prediction model in Tensorflow, and deployed the trained model on the mobile application.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge was not having the appropriate data immediately available, which was needed to create the algorithm. On the first night, it was a challenge to quickly research and determine the types of information/factors that contribute to design fees. We had to cap off our research time to figure out the design and algorithm.
There were also technical limitations, where our team had to determine the best way to integrate the prototype with the front-end and back-end. As there was limited time and after consulting with the hackathon mentor, the developers decided to aim for the MVP instead of spending too much time and energy on turning the prototype to a real front-end. It was also difficult to integrate the machine learning algorithm to our mini app's backend, mainly because we don't have any experience with implement machine learning algorithm in java, especially as part of the back-end of a mobile app.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of how cohesive the project reads. As the first covid hackathon for all the team members, we were still able to communicate well and put our synergies together.
What we learned
Although a simple platform with minimal pages, we learned that it was still possible to create an impactful app. We also learned the importance of making a plan and time line before we start, which helped us keep track of our progress and allows us to use our time more strategically.
What's next for Bossify
Making partnerships to incentivize clients to use Bossify! #fairpayforfreelancers
Built With
- adobe-creative-sdk
- android-studio
- colab
- figma
- google-drive
- java
- python
- tensorflow
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