Community Connector

Bridging generations, one connection at a time.

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Inspirations

As average life expectancy rises, more older adults are left without regular companionship, with adult children busy at work and modern life increasingly isolating. In order to reduce the loneliness of the older adults, we provide a platform Community Connector which turns short companionship visits into a schedulable, measurable, sustainable city service. With local matching and trust-by-design, every visit becomes a building block of urban social infrastructure.

How we built our project

Key Features

The project is a Next.js based web service, designed mainly in TypeScript. MongoDB and JavaScript were used for backend integration.\ With a focus on simplicity, accessibility, and ease of use, the 5 intuitively designed webpages and their interactive features allow the project to be used and understood by anybody, regardless of technical knowledge. Tailwind CSS was used to create a uniform design style and motifs.

1. Home Page

The landing page acts as a hub, navigating between the Connector Login page, Connector Search page, and an Introduction page.\ This creates a streamlined and centralized page structure which is simple to traverse from any point.

2. Introduction Page + Common FAQs

The Introduction page contains context on the website and its processes.\ It uses a simple mission statement and collapsible FAQs for a minimalistic layout, providing important information without being overwhelming.

3. Login Page for Connectors

The Connector Login page functions as a security layer, verifying user credentials against a preset JSON file.\ Verified students can log in simply using their pre-approved school email accounts.

4. Connector Portal

After logging in, the Connector Portal provides a form for users to input personal information before selecting their activity details through a structured selection form.\ This acts as a control for the kinds of activities allowed (for safety purposes) and creates an intuitive guided experience to reduce the frustrations of form-filling.

5. Healthcare/Hospital Portal (Caretaker Side)

The Search Portal provides a guided form to look for listed and approved Connectors.\ The page displays Connectors with matching skills and availability, enhancing clarity and simplicity in user experience alongside the simplified and guided data entry process.

What We Learned

During the development process, one of the most valuable lessons we gained was in collaborative version control with Git.\ Merge conflicts forced us to slow down so as to figure out a better way to coordinate our work. It was messy at first, but it taught us how important clear communication and a proper structured workflow are.

When it comes to the technical part, working with Next.js gave us a strong grasp of how modern web apps are built.

Security was our main concern, which was highlighted to us in our Mentoring Session. We needed to ensure that Community Connect was a secure and safe space for all parties. Addressing this led us to look into implementing security features like login authentication. This also meant limiting our scope somewhat to be certain all users are verified by a reliable party, like hospitals or schools.

The Challenges We Faced

Trade-offs in User Experience

Since our end users include both pre-verified students and busy healthcare staff, we had to balance simplicity and functionality.

  • Healthcare staff required an efficient dashboard for quick scheduling.\
  • Student volunteers needed an easily understandable workflow.

Balancing this trade-off was a constant design challenge, and we iterated multiple times before arriving at a suitable version that felt both lightweight and trustworthy.

Future Plans

Our next phase of development focuses on making the platform easier and more inclusive: integrating NLP and adaptive display modes so that seniors can interact with the platform independently, without always assisting caregivers.

For safety and scalability, we plan to introduce enhanced authentication and smarter search algorithms, enabling connectors to expand beyond closed networks while still ensuring rigorous protection for both seniors and volunteers.

Our long-term vision is to grow into a global platform that reaches all isolated elderly — not only dealing with physical companionship needs, but also supporting mental well-being and community belonging.

Contributions

  • Ting Chieh Lin: Developed frontend, designed UX/UI flow, and managed team.\
  • Jacqueline: Developed login pages for connectors, built the searching portal for caretakers, and designed logo.\
  • Rachel: Developed introduction page, contributed to logo design, and edited 3-minute video.\
  • Jared: Provided voiceover and developed the form page of the connector portal.\
  • Hengzhou: Implemented back-end coding and linked the MongoDB database.

Reference

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