Inspiration
We were inspired by recently published research from Veterans Affairs Canada on the effectiveness of a self-assessment checklist for helping veterans identify potential personal problems in military-civilian transition. The outcome of the research seems perfect for a digital medium, and we believe this application could help a lot of people. (Research can be found here: http://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/about-us/research-directorate/publications/reports/self-assessment-civilian-life)
What it does
The web app onboards the twelve question checklist and allows the veteran or serving member to answer them in a user-friendly way. They are then presented with an overview of the results, as well as an interactive map showing nearby resources according to their unique responses.
How we built it
We started by discussing, at length, the user experience of the app. We wanted to build the platform around the checklist to maintain the integrity of the research. Once we agreed on our end product and mission statement, the team split into areas of speciality. Ethan focused on getting the backend and server functioning, Michael researched to aggregate resource data and fit that data into an appropriate model, and Alex designed the user flow and user interface in HTML/CSS.
Challenges we ran into
There were many challenges in this project. Alex was working on front-end styling, which goes beyond her usual focus of UX and UI prototyping alone. Despite it being a hackathon project, Ethan was determined to maintain polish and professionalism in the build. He learned to master Node.js the right way. Meanwhile, Michael was facing the challenge of constructing a data structure and effective data filtering system to match the user experience we had set out to develop.
An interesting challenge was collecting all of the support services resource data together. It proved to us that this is an existing problem, which an app like this would solve.
Accomplishments that I’m proud of
We’re very proud of the end polish of the app, given the time and technical constraints, and the fact that we all met and formed a small team at the hack. Getting the Google Maps API functioning to the point where our custom-built resource database was displaying nearby was a major accomplishment.
What we learned
How to master Node.js and how to effectively create a data structure that fits with a pre-existing user experience and system design.
What’s next for Second Oath
We envision this app growing. The database would be continuously developed to cover more locations. In the future, a major improvement would be to collect satisfaction data from users and use machine learning to actually improve the checklist over time. This would doubly help connect more service providers to people who need them, while supplying Veterans Affairs and the government with useful administrative metadata tracking.
We truly believed that initiating that small point of problem realization in a veteran can cause a cascade of healthy growth.
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