Localists - an app for supporting local businesses

Inspiration

Small businesses are a crucial part of our community, and we wanted to do our part in supporting them through this challenge. Shopping local is something we care about deeply and we hope to use the skills we have to spread awareness on this topic.

What it does

This app rewards the user for shopping local and allows them to discover new places to shop at. With this app, they can have the cashier scan the QR code at partnered businesses to collect rewards. There is also a map feature to discover businesses nearby.

How we built it

Before getting started, we conducted user research and found that there are not many apps designed specifically for small businesses, whereas bigger corporations have much more access to advertisements. For the project, we created a prototype of our idea on Figma. While the page isn't fully functional, we have implemented some interactions to simulate real life user experience.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to come up with and decide on one final idea. We had trouble finding an idea that was both feasible and fit with our main track. But we were aware that no ideas are bad ideas so we kept pushing the limits and ultimately landed on an idea that we all were passionate about.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We really enjoyed the design process and working with each other. It was a lot of fun overcoming challenges we had on the way, and I think we progressively got better at problem-solving and communicating with each other. Overall, we learned a lot from this experience and really enjoyed working as a team.

What we learned

We learned many new things while working on this project, not just technical skills but more importantly soft skills, like how communicate our ideas in a team setting, how to distribute work among members effectively, and how to ask for help when we need it. Obviously, we also got to work more with the technical side of things. For example, we all didn't know how to add interactions on Figma but after this experience, we became a lot more knowledgeable in doing that. Small things like this helped to increase our confidence and we're really proud of what we've accomplished.

What's next for Localists

We want to keep working on this project even outside the competition because it's something we're passionate about. We were really inspired while working on this and we feel motivated to push this as far as we can. But for now, our goal is for the Localists to become Finalists.

Built With

• figma