Givn

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  Givn.jpg

Our inspiration for this app was from society's silence on food scarcity in low income communities. Somehow it is a topic widely well known but there has not been much change in the last 5 years. According to the Brookings Institution, as of 2015 there were more food insecure elders in the U.S. than there were during the Great Recession. And that 60% of Black and Latino or Hispanic women over age 65 were 200% below the poverty line in 2017, based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure. For white women, that number was 41.4%. Unfortunately, low income communities are populated by Black, Latino, or Hispanic people but learning about the wealth gap between the two communities was too much. Learning about how because of COVID-19, many elementary to high school students: children, cannot get access to their meal plan due to the campus being closed. Many times that meal given by the school is their source of food. Food scarcity has reached families from any age and severity, but there is not a lot of information about food outlets given to low income families. From this, many low income families are uneducated in nutrition and often do not know how to cook fresh meals, which often forces them to opt out for an easier option like junk food. This can create serious health issues like obesity and high blood pressure. We designed a mobile application that uses a GPS system that not only locates the nearest food banks/ food pantries around you but also gives information to our customers on how to donate food and if the chosen food bank/ food pantry even takes certain donations and what they do not take. We also wanted to add a feature of free recipes for our customers where they can use to find fresh and fresh recipes that use ingredients that are commonly found at food banks or food pantries. We wanted to add a review system for food banks and pantries because we found that not many reviews were completely helpful, but now our customers can use our mobile app to talk to each other and trust each other's opinions. We wanted this feature for the food too, so that people can form their own opinions on the recipe and learn from each other through there as well. We want our app to ultimately benefit low income community members who face food scarcity, but we do not want to narrow our audience to be low income community members. We want society members to be able to help, learn, donate as well. We wanted to create an all-inclusive app to educate and spread the right information to community members. I designed it using Figma, Canva, and Adobe Photoshop. We mostly used Figma for wireframing and creating the panels while we used Canva things such as icons. I chose color palettes that weren't too flashy and were nice to look at, so I chose muted colors of green and yellow because they are easy to look at, intriguing color sets.The challenges I ran into were not being able to code or have knowledge in coding. My teammates as well, they are also designers. I just felt like if I knew how to code a bit I could get our app going, but we got so immersed into designing it was hard to stop. I had originally planned to ask my friend who was studying to be a software-engineer, unfortunately they were busy. But from this challenge, my team and I worked even harder to compensate for that in our designs. I am extremely proud of my teammates and the product we made. I absolutely loved how it turned out and now consider it to be a great accomplishment of mine. But, I would have never been able to design such a powerful mobile app without my teammates. They're not only my teammates but also my classmates, my peers, my very close friends. It was the first time we were ever put into teams with each other but I am so proud we were able to take our work seriously and help each other out. In my last and very first experience of having a team to create a product was for an internship that I had over the summer. I was the only designer on the team in charge of a major (UX & UI) and software (Figma), that I was completely familiar with. That in itself was a learning experience, but fast forward. Now, for this project I was able to work in a team with my classmates, fellow designers. It was refreshing being able to speak in design language and how it translated between us. It made me feel like more of a team than I was given one before. By combining the knowledge my teammates and I had about design, we were able to design a beautiful and visually articulate app. Even while working on this late into the night, we were having fun working as a team, communicating and understanding each other. I think that is what made such an impact of how the design of our app resulted. My team and I see a bright future for our product. With the connections we have, we have the capability to make Givn a functional mobile app. We want to continue to develop more on Givn and its current features. We are all excited to reach out to food banks and food pantries and design together through a partnership. My team and I are not afraid to reach out to new opportunities and ask for help, we understand that asking questions is only going to benefit us and our project. Givn was created to be a powerful app to help people, and it makes us really excited to continue working with so much potential.

Built With

• canva
• figma
• photoshop