EmpoWer

A forum and blog-based website to obtain valuable resources from female mentors who work in your field of interest. All girls and women are invited to join this welcoming community.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by Reddit to make a forum where women in various fields can discuss the gender gap amongst their profession. It expanded to the inclusion of external resources like job support, networking opportunities, and biographies of role models in each field. We encapsulated all of these features into a website, in which we provided a navigable prototype through the "Political Science" tab.

What it does

Women of all ages can visit the site to find a sense of community. They can select their desired field and see all of the different resources we have included within each field. The main feature is the discussion forum, in which the user is prompted to share their stories and tag their post with hashtags. The posts can be filtered out by hashtag. The drop-down feature on each thread shows the most recent submission per thread. The "Networking", "Job Support", and "Education" tabs each display a similar layout, and just like the "Discussion" tab, the user can filter out their desired resources to minimize their search time. Lastly, in the "Role Models" tab, the user can see different leaders and celebrities that work/worked in their field, in which they can hover over each leader's name, then click on it to load a biography of the leader.

How we built it

We utilized Figma to create a navigable prototype of the website. We also utilized HTML, CSS, and Javascript in the back-end development.

Challenges we ran into

We often disagreed on the design and layout of the prototype. We ran out of time; ideally we could have created a fully navigable UI in which every field, filter, and role models page worked. Thankfully, we fully finished "political science", and we are proud of what we came up with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Submitting a navigable UI Brainstorming a website cultivated by women, for women Coding a website that mirrors the prototype

What we learned

We learned that it was difficult to develop a forum-like platform that focuses on user-experience more than developer preference. It's hard to design a fully functioning website in a team full of strangers, but we pulled through and we are proud of our work. Also, as students primarily experienced in UI/UX design of mobile apps, we learned that the layout, functionality, and readability of a website is extremely different from a mobile app.

What's next for EmpoWer

We want to integrate a language API in the discussion board. We also want to implement a way to auto-post the resources through hashtags on blogs and twitter. We also wanted to create a login page in which users can save their favorite resources, look through their old discussion board posts, and customize their avatar to correspond with their registered field. We plan to fully finish the website prototype so all fields can be viewed and navigated, as well as increase usability of all of our buttons.

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