Inspiration
The idea for MatchMediation was pitched to us by our teammate and frontend developer, Alicia, after citing her own personal experiences with child custody battles. From this, the rest of our team was able to learn and educate ourselves more on the topic and understand the ongoing struggles that families experience with child custody battles and how it negatively impacts their relationships with their children. We wanted to dedicate MatchMediation to helping families in the Chicago area stay present in the lives of their children by creating a website that helps families find supervisors to supervise their visits with their children. It’s our hope MatchMediation will have a positive impact on the Chicago community by providing an application that helps parents and childrens interact in a healthy and safe environment.
What it does
MatchMediation acts as a website to connect parents going through a child custody battle with supervisors who will accompany them and their children during their visits as part of a voluntary or court-ordered supervision. We hope through our creation we can help create a positive and safe atmosphere for children and parents to interact with one another and build healthy relationships.
With MatchMediation, parents and supervisors have their own unique sign-up process. After successfully signing up, parents will be able to search (with sorting options for supervision type, availability, and cost) for a supervisor and message them. Relevant information such as supervisor rates, supervision types, as well as supervisor schedules will be made available to see users. After finding a supervisor that fits into a user’s schedule, budget, and compatibility, parents then have the option to “reserve” the supervisor to accompany them in a future supervised visit.
How we built it
We used Figma to create the hi-fi prototype and user personas where we tested feasible color schemes, fonts,and styles to fit the branding for MatchMediation.
HTML and CSS were used to bring the Figma prototype to life.
Using the Flask library in Python, we were able to connect our pages to a local server and get real time information from the server databases. Users can truly sign-up, log-in, and navigate MatchMediation’s features.
Challenges we ran into
Our team’s biggest challenge was the time constraint. Working in a short amount of time led to decisions about what pages were priorities to work on and refine first, as well as what features and ideas should be cut out.
The next challenge was aligning our schedules and being sure to keep our team members updated since we were all in different time zones and could not meet in person. This was also the first hackathon for some of our members!
For the front-end, positioning elements was an obstacle at times. However! After trying out various strategies, we were able to create the website looking identical to the original Figma design.
For the back-end, it was difficult to come up with a way to get the information stored about users, searches, and resources to be dynamic. It was also a challenge to get the login information to be validated against that stored data as well, but after researching and trying out different ideas, it became possible!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our team was very impressed with Kristine’s design! Our front-end developers, Alicia and Nathan felt the design was intuitive, aesthetic, and satisfying to implement in HTML/CSS.
We are proud of Alicia and Nathan as they did an amazing job with getting so many screens up, interactive, and responsive in the few days we had as well as keeping the style true to the Figma design.
Alexandria was able to connect and link the pages as soon as the front-end developers finished a page. She was able to make the site receive, update, and display dynamic information through the backend databases she created.
We are proud of each of us for being communicative, enthusiastic, encouraging, and overall fun to work with!
We’re proud of everything we were able to accomplish and create during this hackathon. It was a valuable learning experience that allowed us to grow as designers and developers.
What we learned
The majority of our team was unfamiliar with child custody issues so we had to set aside time to properly study and understand the topic in order to create a website to help others. More specifically, we had to learn how this was impacting the Chicago community and familiarize ourselves with the law there.
Personally, each member of our team was able to learn much more about web-development, what it’s like to work in a team, and improve our skills in our individual focus.
What's next for MatchMediation
We hope to add more features to the website such as reservations confirmation and a rating system for supervisors to aid in the user experience. We also will continue to get the rest of the proposed Figma pages up and running in the front and backend implementation.
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