Home.

Welcome Home.
Your one-stop smartphone application that allows overseas Singaporeans to connect with fellow Singaporeans in their vicinity.

Inspiration

The social aspect of Home. is inspired by Facebook, where users are able to connect with like-minded individuals and create interest groups to share resources with one another. We believe that a sense of community is important wherever you are in the world, and especially for those far away from home for a prolonged period of time, having a close-knitted Singaporean community is what they need.

The safety features in Home. were inspired by the existing eRegister function of MFA, where Singaporeans who are travelling overseas can register their destinations online so that the government can provide necessary aid based on a person’s whereabouts. We aim to extend this feature by incorporating a greater number of resources, such as “places to avoid” in each vicinity of a city and the distress button, which automatically alerts the local authorities about the user’s whereabouts once it is activated.

What it does

Home. is a one-stop smartphone application that allows Singaporeans based overseas to connect with fellow Singaporeans in their vicinity and provides navigation and other essential resources, while taking care of their safety and well-being. These safety and navigation features can also be used by visiting Singaporeans. Additionally, Home. allows travelers visiting an area to link up with its long term residents, facilitating interactions like getting travel advice or even bringing their homesick counterparts gifts from home.

How we built it

We brainstormed our ideas on a common board on Miro, and constructed our wireframes on Figma. Then, we exported each frame to Marvel App and added the clickable functions to them. We chose Marvel App for this as their rendering engine is much smoother than that of Figma, based on our trials.

Challenges we ran into

When we first received the problem statement, we encountered difficulties in settling on the scope of our solution as we did not have the experience of being overseas. To overcome this first challenge in our journey, we decided to interview past students who have studied overseas and understand the challenges they faced. We managed to gather very valuable insights that helped us to form the scope of our project.

As we embarked on the project, we were fully aware of our shortcomings as a team, where coding is not our main expertise. Therefore, we decided to create a wireframe of the application that we envisioned in our minds. We utilised Figma to help us make the application a reality. As we have not used this website before, we went through a steep learning curve to learn the mechanics of the website in the short period of time that we had so that we could produce our final product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how our wireframes are visually pleasing and professional, and the design of it is aesthetically engaging, despite our lack of experience with UI/UX design. We are also proud of how quickly we were able to pick up Figma despite never having used it before.

We strongly believe that the features of the application would be beneficial for our target audience based on the insights provided by our interviewees and this could be the next big thing.

What we learned

We learnt the importance of clear communication and understanding between teammates because we believe that this has largely contributed to us being able to produce the deliverables within 48 hours. In addition to that, we had to be flexible and adaptable to learn new platforms on the go to ensure our ideas could become a reality.

As a result of this project, we were also exposed to the challenges that Singaporeans faced overseas despite not being able to experience them ourselves.

What's next for Home.

We believe that a few more features can be added, so some refinement will be done. After which the wireframe prototype will be tested by a small group for critical feedback and refinement. Once refined, a programming timeline can be constructed and the application can start being programmed.