Can We Habit?

Set goals, form habits, earn rewards, contribute to society, and make new friends. Experience our application and achieve your objectives and make a positive impact to the world!

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Inspiration

During the course of the academic semester, effectively managing our time as students has been a significant challenge. Our primary concerns revolve around the inability to allocate sufficient time towards accomplishing our daily objectives, along with difficulties in engaging in additional volunteer work due to an escalated workload. To address these issues, we have proposed the idea of pursuing activities that would not only benefit the community but also serve as a motivational factor for us to achieve our daily targets.

What it does

While setting a goal may appear simple, it can be challenging to successfully committing to it. To address this problem, we proposed a solution to invite others to join us in setting an achievable challenge. Our service enables users to invest points, which are exchanged from real money, towards their goal and receive them back upon successful completion. Those who participate in the challenge must invest an equal number of points and provide evidence of their progress within a designated timeframe. By working together towards a common goal, users can make new friends, form new communities, form new habits, and receive assistance from others to successfully complete challenges. This system encourages healthy competition and motivates individuals to strive for excellence in achieving their goals. In the event that a participant fails to meet the challenge, the system will collect the invested points and donate them to a charity of their choice. Upon successfully completing a challenge, users can earn incentives based on the percentage of their success. Those who achieve the highest success rates will be rewarded with additional points that can be redeemed for gift cards. This core feature of our service aims to incentivize and motivate individuals to achieve their goals with the support of a community. The platform requires users to have an account to participate in challenges and exchange points for investments. This account also allows users to deposit and withdraw funds similar to a savings account. Users have the opportunity to choose which charities to donate to without having to search for specific organizations by themselves, ensuring transparency in the donation process. Through the process of completing tasks and earning points, users get a chance to earn extra points and could redeem those as gift cards later on. This innovative system not only generates funding for charitable causes but also exposes users to new areas of interest, ultimately increasing demand and engagement within the community. From the bank's point of view, requiring all users to connect to a specific bank account increases the overall number of users in which it can lead more exposure as well as more revenue through fees and interest charges. Additionally, based on the success rate of each user net goals, the bank can collect data about the user's credibility, which may be useful for other purposes.

How we built it

To bring our design to life, we employed react.js, node.js, and MySQL to create a visual representation as well as a data backbone to successfully bring core functionality alive while keeping the aesthetics uniform and clean. The backend was developed using MySQL to enable the model to function between a user's account and the system, enabling transactions as well as data storage to take place. We aimed for a minimalist aesthetic to avoid overwhelming users with excessive information. Our application's primary focus is to facilitate the formation of positive habits, and we believed that emphasizing a minimal objective would be most effective in achieving each goal. We have also chosen a consistent color pallete as this helps create a unified visual identity, enhances user experience, reinforces brand recognition, establishes the website's mood, and creates an aesthetically pleasing design. To ensure transparency in the challenge process, we wanted to utilize an open API for the camera to only function during the verification process. This open API would restrict users to take photos in real time and not use photos from before.

Challenges we ran into

One of the first challenges we ran into was a flaw in our idea. We wanted to create an application to bring together diverse groups of people to form communities. From that idea, we were able to conclude on a model where users would have to set goals either individually or as a group to form habits. We realized this would target diverse groups. However, we also realized that everyone sets goals even with or without the use of technology. How would we make our website to help people commit and stay on track with their goals? We were able to come up with solution by adding stakes which would encourage users and their communities to be adhesive to their challenges.

In the early stages of our project, we encountered a challenge related to the conceptualization of our idea. Initially, our objective was to develop an application that would bring together communities consisting of diverse groups of people. Through a long session of brainstorming, we arrived at a model that required users to establish individual or group goals to develop positive habits. This approach aimed to target a broad range of users with varying interests and objectives.

However, during our planning process, we realized that the practice of setting goals is not unique to our proposed platform, and individuals already engage in this practice with or without technology. This realization led us to question how we could differentiate our website and support users to remain committed to their objectives.

To address this challenge, we devised a solution that incorporated stakes, which would make the users and their communities to remain persistent in their goals. This approach aimed to encourage adherence to their objectives and the development of positive habits.

We faced another issue of time management. There were many times when we greatly overestimated our abilities and set unreasonable timeline which resulted in chaos. We were not able to identify which step of the process was a priority and invested our time in things that did not need it. There were also unexpected events such as one of the teammates lost their scooter and had to go back to find it which delayed the whole process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We take pride in developing a working prototype that provides a visual representation of our system, enabling others to understand how it functions. Furthermore, we are proud that our project not only benefits individual users but also contributes to society as a whole. Our service provides a means for both existing users and those who have yet to discover it to make a positive impact on society.

What we learned and What's next for Can We Habit?

Throughout the hackathon, we enjoyed the entire process of ideating and implementing our ideas to create a working prototype. This experience helped each member of our team develop new or enhance existing skill sets within a limited time frame. For example, there were some team members that had no experience in UI/UX design but through this 24-hour period they were able to learn how to utilize Figma and learn the fundamentals. However, due to time constraints, we were not able to complete all the functions we had planned to implement. In the future, we aim to add more features to our service, such as making or own market inside the app to sell merchandise or third-party merchandise by using the points they earned by completing their goals. Another feature we could add would be making it more detailed and beneficial to society.

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