Olà Chat App

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  Olà is built to be informal, safe, and focuses on community

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  Olà's landing page

Inspiration

While professional counselling and crisis line resources are helpful, sometimes we simply prefer an informal, non-scripted conversation with someone who has gone through similar experiences. In addition to that, COVID has been a challenging time for many of us. Olà is a fun and safe space that many of us wish we had had during the pandemic when we felt very isolated and stressed.

What it does

Olà provides an anonymous space for participants to reach out to listeners who they are best able to share their experiences with. Olà provides participants a way to select one of our pre-themed icons and select listeners with life experiences that best align with creating a safe and welcoming space for the participants to share in.

How we built it

We built our chat-app using HTML, CSS and JS. In the future, we are planning to expand it to a full application using Swift for iPhone application and Java for Android.

Challenges we ran into

We are all first-term CST students at BCIT and many of us have only been programming for a little under two months. It was a fun challenge to integrate three languages we have been learning in our web development class and challenge ourselves to program new features that we have never tried before. It’s been a lot of fun!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

-Using git as version control, something we have only been using for a few weeks. -Integrating three new languages into one cohesive app product. -For many of us, completing our first hackathon!

What we learned

-How to work together and resolve conflicts on git -Planning each member’s role in the development process -Using an Agile-like flow for our development process -Moving between pages using JavaScript -Synthesizing different members’ files to distil optimal code

What's next for Olà Chat App

In the future, we would like to see Olà Chat include the following features.

To increase the safety of and experience of trust for Sharers: A tagging system for Sharers to tag listeners for certain qualities after a conversation Reward badges to Listeners so that future Sharers will have an idea of the Listener’s ‘reputation’ before starting a chat Listeners are required to set up a log-in profile, which will track their reputation, number of conversations had, and badges Listeners will be able to have access to a button that will send helpful, local resources to a Sharer in crisis

To continue building the sense of community: Forum for common Q&A with different categories, anonymous contributions and Listener contributions permitted

To improve the UI/UX: If the app can go global, sorting between different languages and countries to customise user experience Implementation of React would be real cool! Something the team wants to learn in the future More smooth transitions and animations to show loading screens

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript