GeoPoem

Inspiration

Poetry is a fluid, versatile medium that expresses emotional stories in very personal ways. Originally, the idea was to create an app that would recommend poetry based on your location. As we were brainstorming features, we added the component of users being able to submit poems about their experience in a particular location to remove the purely educational/historical theme that arises when reading literature, and transform the app into a space for collaboration and connecting with others.

What it does

GeoPoem is a mobile app that allows users to experience the world through the poems of others. Users can submit poems connected to a location by geotags and accompanied by tags about the poem itself, such as read-time, genre, form, and rhyme scheme. Users can explore others' poetry both by searching locations on a map and by having poems recommended to them based on their current location. The search function allows the user to filter by the aforementioned tags. Users can also elect to have poems read out loud to them by the author, both for accessibility and for the full experience of hearing the cadence and imagining the images in their mind as they walk around the area, listening to the thoughts of strangers living next door or those who lived years ago.

How we built it

We built an interactive prototype using Figma. Working off of a basic UI kit (from figmaresources.com), we kept a cohesive look by deciding on the same fonts and color palette. We heavily modified the kit for the functionality of our app, and our prototype does not resemble the original iteration whatsoever.

Challenges we ran into

Collaboration with Figma proved to be an issue as we all used free accounts, which only allows for two editors on each project. However, we were able to circumvent this issue by each working on our own project and having one team member merge all the frames once we were each finished.

Accomplishments that we're proud of & What we learned

None of us had prior experience with Figma, or even with UI/UX design, or mobile app development in general. This was a great opportunity to dive into the wireframing and prototyping process. We're proud of being able to brainstorm features for a new app, design frames almost from scratch, and make the prototype interactive to exhibit the functionality. Many of us plan to explore more about UI/UX design in the future and develop more prototypes for app ideas we come up with.

What's next for GeoPoem

We plan to learn more about mobile app development and convert our interactive prototype into a functional app. Since we all have experience with Python, we may use Kivy, a Python framework for mobile app development, to do this.

Built With

• figma