NovaCapital

Inspiration

We always hear about investing but whenever we look at investing apps, they are very intimidating and filled with vast amounts of complicated information, hard for beginners to understand. This was our inspiration as we felt a super beginner friendly app to investing would be well received by the community.

What it does

Our app is a simple investing app that cuts down on a lot of the technical jargon found in most investing apps and simplifies and streamlines the user experience, allowing first time investors to be able to easily understand what they are doing. This app is mainly meant to be used in American markets and makes the simplest trades for the users convenience.

How we built it

Utilizing the software design process hand in hand with the AGILE development process, we first began with a rough draft of what we wanted our app to look like and listed some implementation in terms of importance to the project. Once we designed a rough wire-frame and view in Figma, we moved on to the proper front-end implementation with React Native. From here, we decided that it would be best to combine our "front-end" and "back-end" applications because while splitting them is usually good practice, since we were on a crunch for time and did not have access to network privileges for routing and port forwarding, we thought it would be best for the client to fetch and process data. As we got closer to our deadline, we realized how much there was left to implement and we ran into a problem with API implementation that drained hours off of our remaining time, so we put our mobile app design on a diet and did the best we could without compromising on UX/UI, but losing out on the implementation of a few futures. The reasoning for that choice was because we are trying to create a beginning friendly finance application, the better the UI/UX, the more likely the user will continue to use the application.

Challenges we ran into

We had difficulty finding API that would fit what we wanted for our user experience and trying to run multiple API in conjunction proved difficult. Additionally using react to code the frontend and backend was immensely time consuming .

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our app looks really nice and also getting some of the API's working was quite satisfying.

What we learned

We learned how to best use asynchronous functions to make API calls in the React Native environment.

What's next for Nova

We will continue down the path of making our app even more user friendly and simplistic so all have the chance to try and learn how to invest responsibly (eCommerce, built-in tutorials with definitions of terms for first time users, and an easy way to compare stocks for multiple companies).