Healthy Habits

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  Healthy Habits in the chrome web store

What it does

Our app “gamifies” small things you could be doing to keep your mind and body healthy. Every day it will select one random activity from each category, and will wait for you to tick it off. The categories are broken down into “Social”, “Physical”, “Intellectual”, "Spiritual", "Fun" and "Chores". Ticking off multiple activities rewards you with cute pets! This could be a web or native mobile app, but our primary delivery mechanism is via the browser extension. This is an effective but non-intrusive way to remind you of the things you could do today, and, of course, the things you've already accomplished! There's a counter for the number activities ticked as well as the number of consecutive days you've interacted with the app. Extra rewards (confetti!) if you manage to tick off an item from every category in the list in a day!

How we built it

We're friends who have worked together as software developers before, so it was easy enough to get started and stay on the same wavelength, even working from different flats. We chose React and Typescript since we're familiar with this tech, we only had the weekend - React makes UI's easy to build and Typescript makes errors show up fast. We chose to use localStorage for persistence, since it was an obvious and simple option that fitted our requirements

Challenges we ran into

Coming up with an idea we were excited by - we wanted to do something to help motivate people to take small, achievable actions to stay well during periods of isolation, but we struggled to formulate what that would look like, and how to deliver it in a way it would be used and therefore useful. Thinking about apps and games we use and like helped us converge on the idea of building it as a new tab chrome extension, and then we were away!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In a couple of days we were able to get a usable MVP of our idea published on Chrome extensions for people to start using. We did all the artwork and design ourselves from scratch. And we still like the idea even after working for hours on it, and are excited about possibilities to extend it

What we learned

How to create pixelart (a new medium for both of us), how to collaborate remotely during lockdown

What's next for Healthy Habits

We want to get it in front of users and see what they say! We have our own ideas for making it more useful and to keep people engaged - pets might start out as ‘eggs’, and only hatch the day after you receive them. We could extend it so that completing activities and maintaining streaks will give you “points” to exchange for accessories for your pets. (Who doesn’t love hats on cats?). Maybe users want to be able to add their own tasks to the list? It depends what feedback we get

Built With

• react
• typescript