FulLife

Inspiration

On any given night, 41,000 unaccompanied youth ages 13-25 experience homelessness. Data has shown that homelessness among childhood often leads to chronic homelessness in adult life. We hope to end this cycle by helping youth in a crisis build a community and easily find relevant resources.

What it does

FulLife was designed from two perspectives: accessing resources and building a network. We hope to help youth quickly find useful resources through our search engines which sort through free food services, shelters, and educational opportunities, and our page dedicated to emergency hotlines. To promote transparency throughout the app, we built a daily message board where users can share their experiences and other helpful information. We also have review pages for each resource so users can help each other find the right ones. From the network perspective, we wanted to ensure users could stay in touch with each other if they met in person. By quickly scanning another user’s QR code, the app would help them remain in contact.

How we built it

We used Figma to build our prototype. We created different screens for each of our features and then built in examples to demonstrate the key qualities of the app.

Challenges we ran into

One of our main challenges was learning how to use Figma. None of the members of the team had used Figma before, so we had to learn how to use the program before we began implementing our app.

We also ran into the challenge of limiting the scope of our idea. Homelessness is a difficulty that impacts a large number of people. However, implementing the app for everyone facing homelessness would have required more time. Therefore, we decided to implement the app for youth facing homelessness, since they are the most underserved group and are likely find an app useful.

Another one of our main challenges was finding which resources youth would benefit from the most. While researching homelessness in the youth, we found that they face many difficulties including a lack of food, shelter, job opportunities, and daily structure. However, adding all of the resources to the app would have required more time. So, we had to choose between ideas.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Accomplishments that we are most proud of are our search engines. The search engines allow users to quickly access the resources they need all in one place. A common issue we found while researching, is that youth in a difficult situation have to sort through a number of different websites and scroll to the bottom to find a relevant resource. Our app puts everything in one place. The search engines allow users to filter the results to easily find what they are looking for.

Another accomplishment we are most proud of is our chat feature that allows users to chat with other users. Additionally we are proud of our QR code scanning feature that allows users to keep in touch with other users that they meet. Both of these features allow users to network, in order to stay connected in the future and allow for mutual aid opportunities.

What we learned

Throughout this experience, we learned how to create easily navigable user interfaces while including multiple useful features. Our app is aimed at adolescents experiencing difficulties, so we wanted to make sure it had a calming, welcoming personality and is easy to navigate. To ensure this aspect, we created a few help buttons for some of our more complex features such as the QR code.

What's next for FulLife

In the future, FulLife plans to expand their mobile app to a webpage version as there are some homeless youth that do not have access to mobile phones. Creating a webpage version would allow the homeless youth to access the resources and network provided by the FulLife app on a computer.

FulLife also plans to implement features to create more transparency in the reviews page. They plan to do this by adding questions on the write a review page. Users will be able to rate their answers to the questions on a scale of one to five. Sample questions include, how safe did you feel here, how well were they able to provide resources, and would you recommend this location to others? These ratings will allow other users to get a more in depth look at the location and help them decide if the location would be a good fit for them. Furthermore, the main reviews page will show an overview rating to all of the questions so that users can assess the location with a glance.

FulLife also plans to add features to translate the app to different languages as not all homeless youth are English speakers. Additionally, FulLife will implement a planning page where users can organize their day-to-day life and their financial budgets.

Built With

• figma