FINALIST: CatchUp!

Splash screen!
Walkthrough begins...
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Your curated list of friends
Ready-made conversation prompts
In-house ecosystem of chats
Pick and choose who you want to reach out to
CatchUp! with old friends based on geographic location as well

Inspiration

Making new friends as an adult isn’t easy. But trying to reconnect with an old friend can be even more challenging—especially if you haven’t spoken in years. Even though many people desperately want to revive old friendships, they rarely take the chance to do so because of miscalibrated predictions of awkwardness. In truth, however, catching up with an old friend can be a wonderful experience for everyone.

We believe that all people need is just a lil' push.

CatchUp! exists as a productive catalyst for helping users re-cross familiar paths of their unforgotten past. Facebook has made it possible to be connected with hundreds of old friends at a time. But we want to stop these connections from turning into virtual “friendships” that passively exist on your News Feed by empowering users to take the first step.

What it does

At its core, CatchUp! is a productivity app because it utilizes your existing social network for efficient relationship management and streamlines the check-in process using handy conversation starters, dramatically cutting the time you take agonizing about what to say without sounding awkward.

Before building, we incorporated user research and dove into secondary resources, addressing three major pain points when it comes to rekindling old friendships:

1) People aren't sure if the feelings are mutual — With time and distance in between, it can be difficult to know whether an old friend is willing to catch up with you. That's why, on CatchUp!, people can message each other only if they have mutually marked the other as an old friend through the "Add Contacts" feature, saving face and cognitive effort.

2) People aren't sure of what to say — Too many people waste time thinking about the best approach for catching up. Using our ready-made, friendly conversation starters, users can quickly build the stage for more personal or meaningful conversations later on. Start small, end big.

3) People aren't sure where their old friends are anymore — When friends drift apart, it's hard to keep track of where they are around the world. CatchUp! saves people's time by notifying users when they're near an old friend using Friend Alert notifications. Organizing meetups or casual coffee chats with old pals has never been easier.

How we built it

We used Sketch to build a prototype of app UI and to create our logo. We used React Native to build the mobile application and Github to share our code.

Challenges we ran into

Getting all the infrastructure set up to develop this app took longer than we all previously thought. We learned the importance of planning ahead to make sure we hit the grown running (or coding!) when we meet as a team. Likewise, we also found it challenging to divide the workload into small, discrete tasks; this is an area where early planning would be a huge help. Also, although having designers and developers together was good, we had a tough time figuring out the best way to collaborate technology-wise.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

CatchUp! is not your typical productivity app, but it's definitely one of the most important ones. We embarked on a unique mission—to build a tool that harmoniously blends the personal and the practical together such that more people can take control of their social lives.

What we learned

We now have a better grasp of how to conceptualize a minimum viable product and to prioritize the necessary tasks and functions related to said product.