North Star

North Star. Elephants team

Inspiration

Universal access to the limitless potential with modern technologies. We extremely believe in our idea. "Our health lies in our habits"

What it does

Design and delivering an affordable healthy habit solution to inspire people and protect them from inappropriate content. It is the Market place where you can find your North Star and your way will be based on your inspiration.

How we built it

We started with a humble idea to create an inspirational space for people who are stuck in a rut (Groundhog Day) due to health challenges, disabilities, Covid-19, etc. Our Solution based on MACH technologies: Algolia, Commercetools, Contentstack, Amplience, Next.js, and chatbot/voice assistance.

Why Algolia: Algolia gives the ability to build search, recommendation, and personalization solutions very quickly by using their provided widgets and SDKs for any programming language. Algolia's features like A/B testing, Personalization, Reranking, and other industry-standard search capabilities give all kind of business a great tool to experiment in real-time and deliver high-quality services.

Why Commercetools: Because Commercetools is a cloud-native-platform, which provides a flexible API to work with products, customers, orders, and other e-commerce entities out of the box. This platform has SDKs for a lot of languages and provides many integrations with other platforms. Using Commercetools it is easy to create necessary project structure using platform custom fields, extend common platform flow using API extensions, add subscriptions to listen to Commercetools event messages. Also, the platform has Merchant Center, the user interface to configure product attributes, manage product data, discounts, orders, and customer data for all retail channels.

Why Next.js: Next.js is one of the most powerful and minimalistic frameworks at the same time. Based on React, it is ideal for quick prototyping as it does not require a lot of time for configuration and infrastructure setup. Next.js has the best-in-class "Developer Experience" and many built-in features; a sample of them are: Routing system, Built-in CSS and Sass support, and support for any CSS-in-JS library, Client-side routing with optimized prefetching, fully workable development environment with zero configuration. In addition, Next.js is used in tens of thousands of production-facing websites and web applications, including many of the world's largest brands.

Challenges we ran into

We have a lot of product ideas, energy and fun, and limited time for implementation. :) It's hard to define the MVP for few days.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of being inspired by an idea to make the world better.

What we learned

Everyone can leave their mark in history (even if it is the history of Machathon) and "Disability is not an obstacle to success” by Stephen Hawking. We definitely know now, that with MACH technology we can boost and accelerate our delivery.

What's next for North Star

Building a strong community and partnership with Worldwide Universities, Worldwide Health Organization, UNICEF, Paralympic Athletes, Experts, Education platforms to collect and share the best healthy content. Adding the ML and VR/AR for better assistance.

Built With

algolia
amazon-alexa
amplience
commerctools
contentstack
next.js

Submitted to

MACHathon 2021 by the MACH Alliance

Created by

Ideation of the product (using the Design Thinking and JTBD), Research of the problem statement and trends, creating Value Proposition (defining viability, desirability and feasibility of the product), Lean Canvas, Customer Journey, defining the Product Catalog structure and items, creating final presentation and UX.

Mariia Shugurova
Lead Business Analyst/Product Manager. Ukrainian IT Awards winner in Business Analysis nomination
High-level architecture, frontend ifrastructure, integration of Commercetools-Contentstack-Amazon Echo Skills services.

Pavlo Velykyi
Lead Software Engineer
High-level architecture, Algolia integration and configuration.

Maksym Bilohai
Created CommerceTools project, upload product and customer structure. Implemented logic to create or update index for products from CommerceTools in Algolia using CommerceTools Subscriptions. Created service to fetch categories from CommerceTools.

Vladyslav Bieliaiev
Worked on pages layout, styles, and logic via React, TS, and SCSS. Worked on fetch and render categories on the inspiration step. Was working on rendering products from Algolia and user personalization by Algolia.

Denys Svyd