Peer Up

Inspiration

What inspired us to create our project app PeerUP is our own personal experiences as current university students. A major portion of your time in college is spent studying or completing assignments, and this can quickly become overwhelming if you always try to tackle it alone. However, despite knowing it is in your best interest to find people to help you study, it isn't easy by any means to just randomly stumble upon said group of people without having some sort of connection beforehand. Students would benefit from having a tool that can help them connect with other students in any course subject in an environment that fosters integrity, collaboration, and most importantly acceptance. This is the core idea behind our app, you don't have to go through college alone, there is help out there, and our app helps you find it.

What it does

PeerUP signs students up with their university's SSO login in order to help them find study groups for courses or any other topics at their university. After signing up and entering your preferences, you can immediately start searching for study groups to join. PeerUP will show current study groups that are being hosted for each specific course. Badges are displayed for each student's profile, which helps other students know how reliable another student is, and helps encourage study sessions that build trustful connections with peers.

How we built it

The majority of the design process for PeerUP was spent in formatting the idea. We wanted to make sure we designed an app that would be beneficial to people while still fostering a safer and more authentic online community. We started by defining our target audience and moved on to brainstorming the role our app would play in supporting said audience. The initial designs for the user interface of the app were sketched by hand and later implemented on figma with the help of figma's AI maker tool.

Challenges we ran into

We had quite a difficult time designing a well oriented user interface since none of the team members for this project have any experience creating UIs for an app or website. We had a general idea of the flow our app's user interface should have, as in what pages show up first and what is on them, but we struggled with actually creating a good-looking design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of the idea that we came up with for our app since we believe it would be incredibly helpful for university students worldwide to be able to find good study groups to participate in so that they can get the help they need. This is something that hits close to home for all of us as we have all struggled with a course or several courses and wish we had a group of people that we could collaborate with to figure things out.

What we learned

We learned that designing a well oriented user interface for an app takes an immense amount of planning and time. Even with a great idea, if the user interface for an app is very messy or unhelpful, it can greatly impede the apps helpfulness as users may get lost or upset with the app. With limited amount of time, we quickly learned that it would be difficult to manually design something that would not impede the usefulness of the idea behind our app.

What's next for PeerUP

We feel that PeerUP could be greatly expanded upon to fit other tools that can helps students create more connections at their universities. One idea is to have a social oriented page on the app, that helps students search thorough all the orgs and clubs at their university so that they have an easier time finding information on them and actually joining them. We think this would be a great way diversify our app since it will give students the opportunity to find people to study with and people to have fun with.