nynme

Meet Frod, nynme's mascot
Home Page - Where you can see how your friends have completed their habit streak for the day.
Leaderboard - Compete with your friends to see who can keep up with the longest streak of maintaining healthy habits.
Calendar - View how you have been tracking for your habits.
Camera Page - Submit a post to prove to your friends you completed your habit for the day.
Profile - Manage your personal information.

Inspiration

It’s January 1st. You set the goal for yourself to start anew, you want to get your life on track.

As research shows, if you repeat an action often enough in the same context, the act of doing it will start to feel automatic. Developing steady habits that is visible through a tangible, measurable streak number, holds users accountable to completing their habit every day.

In a world dominated by fast paceness, disconnection, difficulty to keep up to date with your habits and friends, there is a visible gap to blend authentic social interaction with effective habit formation.

What it does

nynme🌿 aims to bridge the gap between authentic social engagement and personal development. By allowing users to document daily habits through photos and share them with their friends, nynme🌿 fosters a supportive community environment. Features like streaks and leaderboards adds a motivational layer, encouraging consistency and friendly competition.

How we built it

🫘🫘🫘 Seedling: Brainstorming 🫘🫘🫘 We wanted our app that can actually be used by everyday users and have a positive impact on our lives. We came up with this idea after realising that we wanted a (seemingly) simple application that is easy to use and applicable to everyone with a real-world impact.

🌱🌱🌱 From idea to prototype 🌱🌱🌱 We used Figma to create high fidelity prototypes which helped us design our app in a fun and playful way. We were inspired by cartoon like games to make it feel interesting and engaging. By creating a wireframe, we were able to have a clear vision of how our app should look.

🌳🌳🌳 Fruitition: App Development 🌳🌳🌳 We initially created the application on Figma, and created lofi and hifi prototypes on it, considering the User Interface and User Experience. After that we struggled a lot in trying to integrate the application onto a working front end. We started off trying to make the application directly by converting the code with a plugin called Figma → React Native, but that proved to be too difficult and was not giving the results we wanted. Ultimately we decided to begin building the app from scratch using React Native on VS Code with Expo. This allowed us to build the app and learn how to publish it to be viewed as a demo project by using the Expo Go application.

Challenges we ran into

We did not realise the difficulty to integrate frontend and backend for a social media app, especially as new hackers, which made us confused and frustrated despite doing our best. Thus we changed our focus to have something to show and put all our efforts into the front-end as that was what we were most confident with. Next time, we would ensure to have better estimations of how long it takes to do each phase of building the application so we can utilise our efforts more efficiently.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of nynme as we can truly envision it’s usefulness and positive impact in our everyday lives, motivating everyone to aim for goals that they want to reach. Our idea of nynme has a lot of potential and while we were not able to fully deploy the application with a backend within the time limit, we are still motivated to keep working on the application and one day have a fully completed and usable application that we can use ourselves with our friends.

What we learned

The journey we went on to develop nynme has not been as smooth as we envisioned, however it was through this we learnt to expect the unexpected. As new hackers we also used React Native for the first time which was an exciting yet difficult journey.

What's next for nynme

We understand that keeping a long streak is difficult because life can get busy. Research shows that offering people a little ‘slack’ or ‘emergency reserve’ as they pursue their goals can actually be more motivating than having a rigid set of rules. We don’t want users to stop using the app the moment they released they broke a streak. If we have the opportunity to, we would implement a Streak Freeze, which would grant users flexibility to take days off when they need to. After failing to reach a subgoal, users with goals framed with emergency reserves feel a greater sense of perceived progress, causing them to feel more committed to their goal.