Kudos App

Description

Kudos App is an application that aims to help people from an organization send appreciation, encouragement, and kind thoughts to their colleagues that have achievements.

Inspiration

Brainstorming ideas for this hackathon, I really liked the idea to send kudos to someone since it aims to spread appreciation and create an environment full of good vibes and happy thoughts.

The inspiration came from the need for a way to send easily and in quickly a nice message to congratulate, encourage or just send some nice ideas to a colleague. Since remote work is more and more used and people started to communicate more digitally, we also tend to forget to show appreciation to our colleagues or our management. We often forget to thank the manager who takes us into consideration when deciding something or to thank our colleague who helped us when we were blocked.

Using the Kudos App application, these kinds of situations can be covered even if we ended the call with our colleagues or even anonymously if we just want to send feedback or nice thoughts to someone.

What it does

Kudos App is an application that collects some user input and sends it in an email.

The application has three screens.

1. The first one is to introduce the data, so the user has to add the person who he wants to thank, the image that describes his thoughts, and the message that he wants to send.
2. The second screen is to preview all the added details.
3. The third screen is for confirmation that we sent the kudos.

Of course that we can navigate throw these three screens and we can resend kudos anytime to anyone. Here is a flow diagram that describes the connection between steps.

How we built it

The application was built with Forge, using the category UI Kit and the template Confluence Global Page.

Challenges we ran into

This was the first application created with Forge, so first I had to understand how the Forge works, what options I have as templates, and how to install the applications. I started to experiment with all kinds of types of applications and I had to understand where to look to find the application in my Confluence account. When I found a suitable template for me (Confluence Global Page) I had to understand the UI Kit and its components. The documentation was the main source of information for it.

The biggest challenge was sending emails. I was surprised that exists an API for sending notifications but is not so easy to use, it is needed to create a request to be able to use it, so I had to create my own email service to send emails. It was the workaround that made it possible to finish my submission. For production purposes, the application will need to access the notification API.

Another challenge was to do the style of the application because the UI Kit has not had so many options for the style and I had to be creative with the custom elements.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am really happy that I managed to understand the Atlassian ecosystem and to create the Kudos App application. It had many challenges and I managed to overcome them and submit the project.

What we learned

During the implementation, I learned that the initial plans for a project can be influenced during the implementation, and that is needed to be creative and find new solutions to be successful.

What's next for Kudos App

Kudos App is a valuable application that will be published in the Marketplace, is useful for organizations that want to improve the communication and collaboration of the employees. To publish it to Marketplace is needed to do a few changes in the layout of the application and replace the sending email component with the official notification API. The plan is to start to improve the application and publish it as soon as possible.

Built With

• atlassian
• confluence
• forge
• ui-kit