Friendy

design
notification text message
Logo

Inspiration

As students transition from online learning to in-person classes, they may feel lost and lonely without any guidance. The large and unfamiliar university campus might feel intimidating, especially, when students didn’t have the chance to be on campus or make any new friends online. Luckily our app, Friendy, will bring students together when they are on campus, and they will have all the resources they need to succeed in in-person learning. Students can prepare for their return to campus and make the best of their university experience.

What It Does

This application aims to eliminate the barriers between students and makes it easier to make new friends on campus. When the student is free after class, they can enable their notification settings which allow the app to notify the user by text message if there are any other students who share 3 or more common interests within the range of 500m on campus. It will also let students to chat with each other and show their locations on a map so they can easily find each other to hang out (if they choose to). Commuter students can find a reason to stay longer on campus and enjoy their time with new friends instead of going home immediately after class. The app also includes the location of school/club events for students to participate in and campus resources for them to access. Friendy allows students to navigate their way around campus like a pro and meet students from different programs for social activities outside of class.

How We Built It

We used Figma to design the frontend and vanilla JavaScript to connect it with the backend. We used Express, Node, and MongoDB for the backend and used Twillio API to send the text messages.

Challenges We Ran into

We have an awesome frontend UI design using Figma, but it took us a lot of time to make and figure out how to convert that design to useable HTML and CSS files. It was also difficult to design all our ambitious ideas into a user-friendly interface for students to use, especially when we are all pretty new to Figma.

Accomplishments that We're Proud of

We are proud that we have completed the essential feature of the website, which is to send text messages to notify users about nearby students who share common interests with them based on their current latitude and longitude coordinates. We also have a colourful frontend design, and it is responsive to the mobile browser. Our whole team like the design of the app.

What We Learned

We learned a lot about Figma and its related plugins. We also learned how to use Twilio API to send text messages.

What's Next for Friendy

We are planning to change the website into a mobile application and finish implementing what is left for this product, which includes chatting with each other and rendering a map to show the users and resources. Our team also wanted to include some mental health, self-care, and studying tips for students on our app to motivate them to do well in school. Friendy can also teach students how to save money on campus and possible student discounts around the area. We can also create a more detailed quiz on our app to assess the similarity between students before listing them as potential friends on our friend finder page.