fruitful

Inspiration

fruitful is inspired by the New York Times' "8-minute phone call" concept, part of their 7-day happiness challenge, and rooted in clinical research on the importance of social connection. The nearly 80-year Harvard Study of Adult Development (Mineo, 2017) found that close relationships are the key to long-term happiness and health, with current director Robert Waldinger noting, "Tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too." Additionally, research by Mastroianni et al. (2021) highlights how phone calls often drag on despite both parties wanting them to end, making a pre-defined 8-minute limit more effective. Moreover, Kahlan et al. (2021) found that frequent, brief phone calls significantly reduced loneliness, depression, and anxiety in adults.

By combining these insights with the adage "an apple a day keeps the doctor away," fruitful reframes it for mental wellness and happiness. As a team of soon-to-be graduates, we set out to inspire users to schedule and maintain 8-minute check-ins, helping them nurture meaningful relationships while navigating the transition into busy post-graduate life. Since technology often fosters surface-level social interactions, we hoped for fruitful to provide a way to leverage technology for deeper, more rewarding connections.

What it does

fruitful visualizes your circle of core friends, using colors to represent the strength of your connection based on 8-minute phone calls. Red means it’s been a while, yellow indicates a moderate amount of time has passed, and green shows you’ve called recently. The app helps you stay on top of maintaining these relationships by reminding you to reach out, showing the last time you contacted a friend, their current status (based on their shared availability), and a comparison of time zones. This makes it easy to see if now is a good time to call or to schedule your next meaningful conversation!

How we built it

We used React native to build the frontend, and Expo for the framework. Due to time constraints, we used static data for friend profiles. For design, we used Procreate and a bit of Photoshop to make the apple characters. Prototyping was done in Figma! 🍏🍎🍏

Challenges we ran into

When generating the development server in React Native, one of our developer's computers had errors that prevented it from loading. Even after working with mentors for hours to diagnose and solve the issue, it could not be resolved. Based on time constraints and time already sunk into solving the issue, we pivoted them to using a sandbox to make individual components instead. The sandbox was also a bit unreliable causing long load times for rendering previews. Although this was a crippling challenge to our team, we are happy to see what we accomplished when working together to find alternative solutions and maintain productivity despite these technical setbacks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Using Procreate for the first time! 🤭
• Creating a mobile app 📱 from scratch for the first time (only worked on existing mobile projects or web apps before)
• Loved playing around the apple theme 🍏🍎 and integrating it into the design + implementation
• Getting the routing working for each contact
• Implementation matches the design quite well
• Staying positive and finding alternatives despite many technical setbacks

What we learned

Learned more about cross-platform mobile development! + React Native can be difficult and finicky!

What's next for fruitful

• Creating a backend & database, everything has static data on the front-end right now
• Implement the edit profile & edit contact pages
• Set up reminders to notify users to contact their friends regularly
• Graphical data/tracking for frequency of checking in with certain friends
• Integration with other social media (ex. can contact them through Discord, Messenger, Instagram)

Built With

• expo.io
• figma
• ios
• procreate
• react-native
• typescript