Nudge

Inspiration

Our inspiration for Nudge was the difficulty in keeping up with friends and acquaintances in our outer social circles. For many people, the friends you haven’t caught up with in a while are people you’d love to talk to but don’t have much to talk about. It can be awkward and difficult to bond because you lead very different lives, but one thing we all have in common is the need to take good care of ourselves. What better way to bond than over self-care?

What it does

Our project combines messaging with self-care. It is a social self-care habit tracker that reminds you to send your friends personalized “nudges” to practice good habits and take care of themselves. It also allows you to track your own habits.

How we built it

To build the project, our team split up into two groups. One was focused on the backend and the other was focused on the frontend. For our backend, we used MongoDB, Express.js, and NodeJS. For our front end, we mainly used React Native. Once the backend was finished and the frontend was almost done, we joined forces and focused on connecting both parts.

Challenges we ran into

One notable challenge we faced was connecting the frontend and backend of our product. We had to complete a lot of testing in order to make sure that the backend endpoints worked. Since our code dealt with groups and friends, we tried to integrate graph algorithms to help find connections between friends but that solution did not work very well in our tests. We got the other endpoints to work successfully.

What we learned

Alice: I learned a lot about version control with GitHub and gained experience in using React functional components. Aiden: This project was tricky with some parts of the backend. I learned a lot on how to combine multiple http requests for actions that deal with multiple pieces of data. Bryan: I expanded my knowledge base to include basic react-native and practiced working in a team. Prateek:I learned about using React Native and how to use React to build mobile apps.

What's next for Nudge

In addition, we are currently working to expand the friend recommendation system by using graph theory to match you with friends that you may know. We also plan to implement a contact importing system to make it easier to find people you know on the app. Eventually, once Nudge is ready for production, we would love to publish the app on the App store.