famfare

wireframe
prototype
cover
lifehack problem!
solution
about us

Inspiration

By the time we reach 18, we will have spent 90% of the time spent with our parents. Due to generational differences, it's often hard to check in with your family because 1) not everyone is on the same social media app, 2) it's hard to find the right questions to ask due to generational differences, and 3) many people are far apart after COVID :( Through this app, we want to create a fun way for families to stay close with each other and sustain these important relationships in your life!

On a broader level, familial disconnect is a growing issue; such a phenomenon stems from maturation, tension/negativity, as well as work-life imbalance. Through various stages of life, familial relationships change, and while a family might be spending physical time together, engagement remains a common issue. Often, it’s both challenging and overwhelming to navigate rekindling a weakened connection.

What it does

Famfare app asks your family daily prompts that you can respond to through text, photo, or video. Our questions are designed to make conversations flow easier between families, and you have to respond to view how your family has been doing today. Users are incentivized to answer through game mechanisms - for example, the user on the most days answered gets to decide the question for the next day anonymously, etc. Each day, we create an image of all of your family's response to questions together and help compile a family story at the end of the year! You can also friend other families on the app to view their daily stories

How we built it

Illustrator, Expo (JS), firebase

Challenges we ran into

Design-wise, one of the challenges we ran into was considering how we wanted to go about designing our user interface, specifically considering the broad audiences we hoped to gear the application towards. We opted for a simple spread of features that are easily navigable and self-explanatory. Technically, we were challenged by the the difficulty of learning mobile development and figuring out how to use Firebase, thinking about how we wanted to design our database for efficiency as well as for the possibility of future development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We came in to HackGT with no prior experience building mobile apps and we learned how to use Expo, firebase, AWS in the course of 36 hours (including 10 hours+ of firebase debugging) into a prototype with key features implemented.

What we learned

We learned that pushing out secure and well designed systems requires a lot of thinking, both of current features in progress as well as future updates that may occur. On a technical level, we learned how to use Expo to develop applications for iOS/Android, as well as how to develop authentication systems and realtime databases using Firebase.