GroupTrack

GroupTrack Front Page
GroupTrack Calendar
GroupTrack Nudge
GroupTrack Nudge Received
GroupTrack Celebrate
GroupTrack Social Tab

About The Project

GroupTrack was inspired by a simple problem: personal habit apps are great for tracking yourself, but consistency often improves when you are accountable to other people. We wanted a product where friends, classmates, or teammates could check in together and see progress in one place.

What We Built

We built a full-stack habit accountability app with:

Group creation and invite-code onboarding
Shared habit definitions across a group
Daily check-ins and monthly calendar visualization
Social layer: nudges, celebrations, and achievement posts
AI-assisted motivational message generation with factual context
Achievement "Congratulate" interactions
QR/invite-link sharing that works in local and deployed environments

How We Built It

Frontend: React + TypeScript + Vite
Backend: FastAPI + SQLAlchemy
Database: PostgreSQL (Docker), SQLite-compatible local paths in dev/test
Infra/Dev workflow: Docker Compose services for frontend, backend, and database
AI integration: Anthropic Messages API for generating nudge/celebration/achievement text

The product logic centers around group habits and daily check-ins, then derives social context from real completion data. This context is used to generate more accurate, motivating messages instead of generic prompts.

What We Learned

Real-time-feeling UX often depends on backend response timing (for example, flushing writes before returning counts).
"Supportive AI" quality improves dramatically when prompts include concrete context and explicit tone constraints.
Team accountability UX must balance visibility and privacy (for example, recipient-only nudge/celebration popups).
Deployment-ready URL handling matters for share features (QR links, invite links, and environment-based base URLs).

Challenges We Faced (and How We Addressed Them)

Generic or inaccurate motivational messages
- Challenge: Early nudges sounded generic and did not reflect actual habits.
- Fix: Expanded social context and tightened prompt rules (uplifting tone, tiny next-step framing, no guilt language, factual grounding).
Social interactions not updating immediately
- Challenge: Congratulation counts could appear stale until another refresh action.
- Fix: Flushed kudos inserts before counting in the API response so the frontend updates instantly.
Cross-device invite/QR reliability
- Challenge: Links based only on local origin can break in some deployment/network contexts.
- Fix: Added support for VITE_PUBLIC_BASE_URL with fallback to window.location.origin.
Landing-page navigation clarity
- Challenge: Header links and section targeting were inconsistent with sticky nav behavior.
- Fix: Added section anchors, smooth scrolling, and proper scroll offset handling.