Elderizz

Inspiration

The inspiration is a combination between our own experiences using dating apps and the witnessing of elderly loneliness present in Singapore. Some of our teammates have had vast experiences using dating apps in their quest for romance and love, being empowered by these apps to meet new people and potential partners as part of their journey. The other half of our team are frequent volunteers with the elderly or have single grandparents, and they have witnessed the depths of loneliness being felt by thousands of seniors in our society today. Our inspiration for this project stems from a deep drive to improve our society as well as a deep belief in love. The Elderizz team is but a team of empathetic hopeless romantics who believe that the elderly deserve love too.

What it does

It is a dating app, following the formula of a typical dating app but with senior-focused enhancements such as new unique features and larger UI. Our dating app will leverage the existing activities hosted by various active ageing centres and community centres in Singapore, partnering with them to host and promote such activites to our users. But, at the core of it all our app fulfills dreams, creates love and betters society as a whole.

How we built it

Our team was split into a few roles, with a product owner, 2 designers and 2 programmers. It was the role of the designers and product owner to outline the features necessary to the app and once finalized, it was taken to the developers for measurement and tasking. Features seen to be too large were either deprioritized or substituted for prototyped versions lacking functionality due to time constraints. At the beginning, product ideas and features were shared via a Google Doc for discussion amongst the team and following that, the ideas were brought to Figma for initial prototyping. Once the general design of the app was finalized, the developers got to hack away at the features, using Flutter for cross-platform mobile development and Supabase for authentication and backend persistent storage of data such as user interactions or profile pictures. In the development of features, the use of Claude models via VS Code Copilot was key in implementing features quickly and efficiently. We found AI to be much more effective when given an appropriately constrained portion of the code to work with. This modularization helped to keep the codebase readable and easy to work with, allowing the developers to quickly pump out features.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we looked to use a tool called Firebase Studio as our development environment, it was a cloud platform that provided developer tooling out the box, minimizing the time cost of setting it up ourselves. However, as the app quickly grew complicated, we found the emulator provided by Firebase Studio to be slow which greatly hindered development, which prompted us to go back to using traditional local IDEs like VS Code. This process did indeed take us more time initially as we had to install and set up the coding environment, however after the initial bump it was smooth sailing as we could debug and more efficiently pump out features.

While initially confident, we also found that creating a fully featured app within a span of 2-3 days was a behemoth task. There are so many small details that goes into making sure features work together well which each takes off valuable time which could be spent designing key features instead. One example was that we wanted to let users post background photos, which was a feature that was not as important given that we had more important features such as creating an events tab for the elderly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being a team that dared to venture where no one believed. The idea of an elderly dating app may seem like a joke to some, but to us it is a strong belief and possibly a life mission, and the Elderizz team's greatest accomplishment should be the courage to take the first step. We also have a pretty cool app prototype and our plan to collaborate with active ageing centres and community centres is nice too.

What we learned

We found that giving AI a properly scoped and isolated part of the app to work on is the best way to make use of its ability. However, it falls short when it comes to needing to integrate features with existing parts of the codebase, of which this would need a base level of technical expertise to fix before continuing to give the AI more prompts. All in all, we do find that AI is excellent at rapidly churning out prototypes, but it is important to avoid digging ourselves into a hole such as by continuously prompting it to fix minor bugs instead of fixing them ourselves, which would make the codebase messy and break existing features.

What's next for Elderizz

The Elderizz plans to contact and liaise with the various active ageing centres and community centres, gaining their input and onboarding them onto this project as partners. Alongside those tactical efforts, we will work to change lives for the better and tear down the wall of stigma that exists in elderly love.