CONNECT

Home page
Login page
open page
home page when button lights up
personal profile page

Inspiration

In the past two years, many people have experienced isolation and can’t see their loved ones in person due to pandemics. As humans are social animals and the connections among individuals heavily rely on the communications, physical distance plays a key role in a relationship. We aim to design a product that can help restore closer connections among people and promote more effective communications. Although there are many social media out there, where one can chat with friends online, none of them has emphasized on expressing “I miss you”. And in many cases, we hesitate to contact our loved ones because we think we would bother others’ lives rather than provide emotional values. Therefore, we develop CONNECT, where users can express their feelings more straightforward and find out if it is the right time to call your loved one.

What it does

This application is designed primarily for couples or two people who are closely associated. After signing up for CONNECT, users can edit their personal information in the profile page. The unique UserID is used to distinguish each user and allow them to search and add someone in the home page. The app only allows the user to add one person to the contact list, and if you want to follow a new person, you have to delete the current person you are contacting with. Once two people follow each other, they can click the button at the bottom when they miss each other, and the bottom will turn red if the other person also clicks the button within 10 minutes.

How We built it

We used React Native for front end and Google Cloud and Firebase for backend.

Challenges We ran into

One challenge we have is that our team is new to app development; thus, we have to learn new programming languages under pressure and apply it quickly. From a technical perspective, we found that it is difficult to design an elegant user interface; to solve this issue, we first sketched the design of each page on paper, and started coding after we had a concrete idea of how the app should look like.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

A functional application, where users can register/log in their own accounts, search and add a friend by unique UserID. The button on the homepage will turn red if two friends press the buttons within a 10 minutes time window. Users can also edit personal information and change the scene of the app in the personal profile page.
Neat Appearance, the style of each page are uniformed; no unnecessary functionalities; easy to use and access.