HomieZone

Inspiration

Based on personal experiences as well as interview with our friends and family members living overseas, we understand the pain of having to deal with loneliness of living away from friends and families. This was what inspired us to come up with HomieZone, which caters to homesick Singaporeans in hopes that they would be able to connect with other Singaporeans in their area.

What it does

HomieZone is a social media application which aims to connect overseas Singaporeans with other overseas Singaporeans in their area based on their location. This allows them to meet and chat with Singaporeans through organizing/joining meetups, in hopes that Singaporeans overseas are able to connect with one another. Additionally, to make it uniquely Singaporean, we have incorporated users to signup for HomieZone using their Singpass account, which would be able to be used to connect with LifeSG as a one stop platform for Singaporeans to use. Asides from that, when users signup, they would be able to customize whatever interests they have e.g cooking/sports, and the application would be able to showcase posts from other recommended users to the user.

How we built it

The sketch of our application was built using Miro, while the prototype of our application was built using Figma.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenges were coming up with new and novel ideas for our application given the tight deadline, as well as having to find and interview our friends/relatives to learn about their struggles with living overseas.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the tight deadline, we were definitely proud that our ideas were able to come to life as we managed to put together a finished prototype.

What we learned

Technical skills wise, we learnt how to use industry grade software such as Figma and Miro to transform our ideas into real life. Additionally, through our research we have also learnt how people in the industry properly formulate application ideas and the process of a user journey. Hence in the future, if we ever decide to pursue careers in UX design, we would be more familiar with the process of creating a user journey.

What's next for HomieZone

If our idea gets selected, we intend to incorporate ways in which we can verify whether users have been vaccinated with Covid-19 flu shots or not, based on feedback from our peers. This could potentially make meetups safer for everyone as well.