Hand in Hand

Inspiration

When focusing on the safety track for SWEHacks’23 our group members all thought of a safety concern relevant to our lives. As many know, the area around the University of Washington campus isn’t always the safest. As UW students we are very aware of this fact and always do our best to stay safe on and around campus. This is an issue that all of our group members are familiar with and find important. As students, we might feel uncomfortable more often and we want campus to be inclusive and safe for everyone, especially women and non-binary individuals. Sometimes the best way to stay safe though, is through word of mouth, when others notify you of any safety concerns nearby, or areas that should be avoided. This is what inspired us to create Hand in Hand!

What it does

Our app allows these word of mouth notifications to reach the whole community easily. An individual user can add safety notifications to a community map, or simply just scan the community map for safety hazards in order to keep themselves as safe as possible. The app also provides users with a condensed list of emergency resources and mental health resources. Users can also allow trusted friends to view their location if they wish, so friends can check up on them and ensure they are safe. One thing we thought was important was that users could add safety concerns even if they were not as serious, and simply made them uncomfortable, for their community to be aware of.

How we built it

We built our app primarily using Figma for design, and we also used ProCreate to design our logo.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges due to our team's combined lack of coding ability. Nobody on our team had much coding experience, or enough to make our app functional. As a result, we mainly focused on our app design, ideas for how the app would work, and implying functionality using Figma.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of the format and layout of our app. While designing Hand in Hand, we put a great deal of thought into the user experience, and we are extremely happy with how it turned out. We hope to make Hand in Hand available for use to the public once we gain some backend coding skills.

What we learned

We learned how to work as a team more efficiently and how to use Figma despite most of our team members not having experience with it prior to starting this Hackathon.

What's next for Hand in Hand

We plan to finish developing Hand in Hand as a team over the next few months. We are very proud of our design, but we need to add the technical elements and back end to make our app function correctly. I hope everyone looks forward to our fully functioning app :)