Inspiration
According to a national survey, 36 percent of young adults reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time or all the time” because of the pandemic. We decided to try to help these people by creating a bot to connect discord users together.
What it does
Our bot asks the user a few questions to determine what they are interested in, and then matches them with another discord user with similar interests.
How we built it
We started by asking ourselves how discord would design a bot for this application. Then we brainstormed a design and developed the bot. Once the bot was created, we went through several phases of UX testing to refine and polish the UI.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into several challenges during this hackathon. For instance, we had a lot of trouble with asynchronous programming, but by overcoming these challenge we learned a ton about asynchronous design patterns. Another challenge that we faced was the limitations on discord's bot API. The constraints imposed by the API made it difficult to design a good user interface, so we had to get creative to overcome these limitations. For example, we formatted our survey questions using embeds, which are typically used to display a bot's profile information. Finally, we had a difficult time coming up with questions to ask the user. We overcame this issue by working as a team to brainstorm and refine the questions asked by the bot.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are more proud of the challenges that we overcame during this hackathon. For example, learning asynchronous programming was very difficult, but by working together we were able to figure it out. We are also proud of our bot's UI. We took it through a lot of iterations during this project and it has improved significantly since we started.
What we learned
We learned a lot about databases, asynchronous programming, interacting with APIs, and UI design during this project. We also learned not to give up when faced with a difficult challenge. There were several points during the hackathon where we thought that the bot would be impossible to make in just 24 hours, but we managed to overcome these roadblocks and release a successful bot regardless.
What's next for Discord Connection Bot
We plan to add it to discord servers to help people connect and find friends. We hope that by doing this we can help young adults across the world that feel lonely find new connections during the lockdown.
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