Friendlink

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  Login page

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  Chat page

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  Profile page

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  Cards displaying available people in order of who best fits your hobbies/interests

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  MBTI page that can be later linked to the profile page

Inspiration

Our team was inspired by the unfortunate reality of socialising in UNSW. It is difficult to make long-term friends at uni, with transient, surface-level friendships being too common term after term. Friendships rely heavily on social groups or subcoms, which can be hard to schedule and are often career oriented rather than connection oriented, or on preexisting high school groups.

What it does

Our app allows users to create a profile. Most notably, we allow users to enter a series of hobbies or interests. With this information, our app will find other people who share common traits with you.

Users can browse profiles, connect with people who have similar interests, and start conversations in a lower-pressure environment compared to traditional social media. The goal is to help students form genuine, long-term friendships rather than temporary academic acquaintances.

How we built it

We used Next.js with React and deployed our app on Vercel. We store user information on supabase.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was balancing simplicity with usefulness. We wanted onboarding to be quick and approachable, while still collecting enough information to make meaningful recommendations.

We also ran into challenges integrating authentication and user profile management with Supabase, especially when linking user accounts to profile data securely. Designing a responsive frontend that worked smoothly across different devices while staying visually clean was another significant challenge during development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we managed to build a functional social platform prototype within a limited timeframe. We successfully implemented account creation, profile management, and interest-based matching in a way that feels intuitive and practical.

We are also proud of creating something aimed at solving a real social issue experienced by many university students rather than just building another generic social media platform.

What we learned

We learned how to structure a full-stack web application using React, Next.js, Supabase, and Vercel together in a modern development workflow.

We also learned the importance of planning UI and user flow early.Beyond the technical side, we learned how difficult social product design can be, especially when trying to encourage genuine interaction instead of shallow engagement metrics.

What's next for Friendlink

We would like to link the MBTI page to user profiles. It shouldn't be an ultimate determinor of how users are recommended to you, but adds more variation and user customisability. We also want to think about how to encourage people to meet in person rather than keeping conversations online, such as possibly chat length limits.

In the future, we also want to improve the recommendation algorithm, add event or meetup features for UNSW students, and implement stronger moderation and safety systems to help users feel comfortable using the platform.

Built With

• javascript
• react