kernel

SpotCheck Find your vibe. Own your space. Inspiration Every student knows the struggle — you need a place to sit, focus, or just hang out, but you have no idea if the campus café is packed, if the library is dead silent, or if the rooftop spot even has Wi-Fi. We wanted to fix that. SpotCheck was born out of pure frustration of wandering around looking for the right place and never quite finding it. What it does SpotCheck lets students find nearby cafés, restaurants, and hangout spots filtered by vibe — not just star ratings. Quiet and focused? Lively and social? Good for a group? You set the mood, SpotCheck finds the match. Each spot shows a live busyness indicator, crowd-sourced vibe tags, Wi-Fi availability, and whether it's study-friendly or social-friendly. How we built it We designed SpotCheck as a UI/UX MVP using Figma for the core screens — home feed, vibe filter, spot detail page, and a map view. We mapped out the full user flow from open to decision, keeping the experience under 3 taps. Adobe Express was used to create our pitch assets and social-ready presentation graphics, helping us communicate the brand quickly and visually. Challenges we ran into Designing for vibe is surprisingly hard. "Quiet" means different things to different people. We had to simplify our filter system multiple times to avoid overwhelming the user — the hardest design decisions were always about what to remove, not what to add. Balancing the map view with the list view on a small screen was also a real layout challenge. What we learned This was our first time designing under a real time constraint. We learned how quickly decisions need to be made, how important it is to define your user early, and that a clear user flow matters way more than pretty visuals. We also got hands-on with Adobe Express for the first time and were surprised by how fast it let us produce polished assets. What's next for Kernal Live busyness data via Google Maps API, user check-ins, and a "save your spots" feature so you never lose your favourite place again.

Built With

• adobeexpress
• figma