FAAD Help

Inspiration

Sheridan College is a home to a very diverse student population. Although our faculty members try their best to treat everyone equally, various degrees of bias based on one’s race, appearance, accent, or sexuality is inevitable among students. Because of this, we understand students might feel insecure sharing their work during critique sessions. However, critiques and feedback are an essential part of growth, especially for FAAD students. This inspired us to create a safe space for students of all backgrounds to work towards success without the fear of judgment.

What it does

FAAD Help is a mobile app to promote a safe space to seek help within the Sheridan Faculty of Animation, Art and Design (FAAD) community without the fear of judgment, inequality and bias. By students appearing anonymous, they will feel more confident to ask for help, feedback or critique on their projects.

How we built it

We brainstormed some ideas first and decided to work on the theme of anonymous help. We also explored users' needs and what their fears might be. Style tiles, fonts, colour palettes were a part of our exploration. We built low-fidelity wireframes and gradually improved our design through teamwork and good energy. Arriving at our high fidelity wireframes, we prototyped it through Adobe XD’s prototype feature as a demonstration of how the app should work.

Challenges we ran into

Experiencing our first hackathon in a virtual environment was intimidating due to our lack of prior experience. It was unfortunate that we were unable to code our project, but we managed to solve it using Adobe’s interactive prototype features to make our prototype realistic. Also, we had a few trials and errors while recording the video demo. With practicing presentation skills with each other, however, we were able to finish recording our video successfully.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a group of first year students currently enrolled in the second semester of the Interaction Design program, we are proud that we have successfully applied the skills we have learned in the first semester into this project. Hackville 2022 was an invaluable experience as it gave us a chance to take initiative of our learning and showcase our growth.

What we learned

The significance of team collaboration was a memorable experience. It allowed us to exchange skill assets and communicate with each other for the best result. We also learned that feelings of intimidation, pressure, and discomfort can foster personal growth.

What's next for FAAD Help

We are hoping to code this app into reality once we acquire the required skill assets. Anonymous help was a very relatable feature when we were brainstorming for ideas. We hope this app can become one of the many resources Sheridan provides to its students.