Mindly - your goodness repository

Mindly, a web-app designed for individuals to keep repository of the good moments in their lives and connect with gratitude before closing their computers at the end of a work day.

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Inspiration

As humans, our brains are inherently wired with a negativity bias that sharpens our senses to potential dangers and to learn from fatal mistakes. In simpler terms, if nine good things and one bad thing have occurred, we tend to pay attention and dwell upon the single negative thing out.

Empirical evidence have been provided through neurological research that repeated absorption of pleasant moments are capable of reshaping our hardwiring (Hanson, 2013), shaping us into more resillient and content human beings. Through keeping a "repository of goodness", we are rewriting the negativity bias encoded in our brain, and to sharpen our awareness for all the good available to us in our own lives.

During quarantine and in a time when the world is filled with discouraging news, many of us have been experiencing emotions of sorrow, mundanity, and loneliness. We have created this web-app with the goal to allow individuals keep a repository of all the goodness in their lives, and engage in the habit of reflecting on gratitude in order to turn enhance their emotional well-being and build their mental resillience.

What it does

Upon opening the app, the user can

  1. Add to repository
    • Record a moment of goodness (in photo or text)
  2. Retrieve from repository
    • Select current emotion (eg. discouragement because this new language is too hard to learn)
    • Look through past moments with corresponding emotion (eg. moment when you felt confident and accomplished because your code actually ran)
    • Option to select date and look through past archives
  3. Journal about mood
    • Follow through journal prompts and write in order to connect with emotions

How we built it

To make this app possible, we utilized the MERN stack to make RESTful API calls and perform CRUD operations within the database backend. Within the front end, our developer worked closely with the UX designer to develop wireframes on Figma, and developed a user-friendly front-end that delivers a seamless experience through the use of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, and Bootstrap. On the backend, we used MongoDB, Express, Node and s3. We choose MongoDB because its quick and easy to setup and get going.

Challenges we ran into & What we learned

  1. Integrating react with bootstrap because of react's unique jsx syntax wherein the developer writes javascript, html, and css all within the same window. As someone who picked up react on thursday, this was especially daunting to the front-end developer and was an early source of frustratinon. To remedy this, he read on react-bootstrap documents and altered his way of thinking about web development into terms of components and states rather than hrefing between singular html files.
  2. State management within react is obviously something that befuddles everyone, epecially newcomers. The general layout of a single page application with React required me to think deeply about the parent-child relationships and make judgement calls on declaring and initializing states. We overcame this through collaboration with the developer and the designer end. In the end, we are able to seamlessly develop a React app.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

  • Clean and simplistic user-interface
  • Seamless development of a React app and single-page application
  • Problem-solving and flexibility with the situations we encountered
  • Learning to use Heroku
  • Familiarization with the design process
  • Creating user survey to gain greater insight into how we can create a web-app that fosters people's emotional well-being

What's next for Mindly (Goodness Repository)

  • Analyze data input to create reports of what things bring the user the most joy.
  • Synchronization across mobile and desktop devices
  • Incorporate AI emotional-identifying feature to identify level of happiness in journalling

Login authentication username: user password: password

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