Journify

The ultimate journaling app!

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Our Inspiration

Everyone needs an outlet, whether it is the child returning from school, a busy adult after a long day of work or the retiree resting on a rocking chair, we all need a way to wind down. This is especially true for those suffering from extreme mental stress, where their circumstances often overpower their own need and their inner voice gets repetitively ignored. To address this, we propose an age-old idea - writing a journal. Though simplistic, reflecting on the day and processing how certain actions impact us (instead of suppressing them) is a powerful method of relief that has time and time again affirmed its continuity.

Journify is our modern take on a journal that aims to build this into a lifelong habit. For those whose environments are often volatile, the contrasting stability of routine often brings a sense of calmness and peace.

What is Journify?

Journify is a web app that incorporates the pros of journaling, the accessibility of devices and the power of semantic analysis on the user's journal to deliver what we feel is a desirable and personalised journaling platform for the end user. With minimal and ergonomic UI, paired with a pastel colour palette that emanates calmness towards the writer, we aimed to create a welcoming environment where the users of our app were comfortable in spilling out their heart's content and sharing their deepest thoughts.

Features like the mood tracker, journal history log and predictive happiness score are all external features which we felt would benefit the user and allow them to better track their emotions and well-being over recent months and recap on the highs and lows of their life. To further encourage user interaction, there's also a journal timeline that enables users to see their ongoing streaks.

How did we build it?

We leveraged our past experiences in front-end development to develop Journify. We chose to use Typescript and supporting frameworks like Next and Tailwind due to their popularity and established support. We delegated the work based on individual strengths and used git branches with defined objectives to ensure parallel and non-overlapping development.

Challenges we ran into

Being in IC Hack, we were keen to impress. Our initial brainstorming involved ideas such as integrating the Spotify API to recommend songs based on the user’s mood, maintaining streaks for daily activity and extensive use of NLP to determine the user’s moods. However, we quickly found that due to our limited manpower and the pressing time, we had to really refine our requirements and think about what we wanted our users to experience. Through much discussion, we prioritised features that we thought made the application stand out and that were fundamental while leaving room for future extensions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For a two-man team, we are extremely proud of the product. From the get-go, we wanted to design a simplistic and aesthetic webpage that even a beginner would be able to navigate. Our proudest achievement is definitely the integration of a journal timeline where users can view the fruits of the labour (inspired by the GitHub activity) and the ability to search past entries coupled with use of modern technology such as semantic analysis.

What we learned

All in all, building Journify was an unforgettable experience, giving us both further exposure to the Next.js framework, working with Tailwind, pair programming as well as brainstorming ergonomic user interfaces. Additionally, It helped develop our project management skills by assigning tasks that were realistic to the given deadline and thinking from the end-user perspective in terms of the utility of each function.

What's next for Journify!

As mentioned above, we had plenty of ideas when thinking about the project. Some of which would have enhanced the functionality and some which would probably end in the bin. However, we are keen to explore more into the NLP aspects of it, enabling a “montage” feature where users would be given a summary of their past week/month. In the ever-fast-paced event of life, we want to enable users to appreciate all the events that often go by so fast and remind them that we should be more appreciative of the present. So why not start your jour-ney with Jour-nify?

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