Chatterboard

Inspiration

Previously we were Club Presidents of our local college STEM club and we noticed fluctuating participation in our workshops and events. Social Media apps like Discord and Instagram was not enough to drive our engagement and required us to put out so much effort in terms of fliers and constant reminders just to be properly heard.

What it does

Chatterboard is a collective of announcements all centered around the campus or university that the student is attending, it functions as a digital notice board on your phone, allowing you to be updated on the most recent changes and events occurring on campus. For a student it is perfect to notify themselves as it is connected to their Google Calendar as well as provide notifications to be able to join in these events. For an organization they can control how often students get notified by default and based on student preferences, even small organizations are prioritized to be seen as long as they match a student's interest.

How we built it

We mainly utilized Figma to bring our idea to light and prototyped the whole app on paper to get a better idea of how screens connect to each other. We also wanted to connect to Google Calendar through API calls so we utilized Zoho Flow to make this happen, currently it is not possible to just use the Figma App to make these API calls.

Challenges we ran into

The Figma web-based app and Figma Windows app is not compatible with API connecting software like Zoho Flow or Make, it has limited uses in terms of commenting on the Figma file to trigger API calls which isn't enough information to "Create an Event" in Google Calendar. However, if our App is developed further, it can be done through Kotlin and Java, making it possible for the App to assign variables based on certain text boxes and to run API calls for the data to be processed in Google Calendar.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our idea as I believe we gathered these pain points of both leading a club/organization as well as being students with many clubs/organizations over many years. We are proud of the UI/UX I believe this app can easily be managed and navigated by first time users unlike some learning curves of Instagram or Discord for some users.

What we learned

Figma, Zoho Flow and API Connections

What's next for Chatterboard

Future development would include a map in our app where students and/or organizations can easily drop pins, this is mostly helpful for events that seem to have very little participation, but also useful for limited-time events like a pop-up shop or a book sale by a vendor.

Built With

• figma