Penguin Desk

Inspiration

As the amount of Internet users grows, there is an increasing need for online technical support. We asked ourselves, what would a help desk look like 30 years from now? Would there be human-to-human interaction? Perhaps the user's problem could be solved before it even happens. While we aren't currently able to predict the future, we can still make it as easy as possible for a client to find the help they need in a timely manner. Too much time of technical support teams is wasted by users not being able to find what they need or not knowing how to solve their problems. We decided to make a tool that makes it as easy as possible for them to find the solutions.

What it does

Penguin Desk is a universal Google Chrome extension. Most technical problems can be reduced to specific roots, allowing solutions to be streamlined for the majority of websites. The user tells our extension what issue they're having or what they would like to accomplish. Our extension quickly searches for all the possible paths that the user could take and automatically does what it determines is the best action. These actions could be anything from page redirection, highlighting steps on each page or autofilling forms. Because of the similar format of most websites, this extension automatically adapts to the user's needs.

How we built it

We built the tool as a Google Chrome extension using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. To run it, we sideload it into the browser. We use a synonyms API to find other words on the page that could help the user solve their problem.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a numerous amount of bugs. Everything from console logging breaking our program, to comments being ignored. We found it difficult to get the files to communicate between each other.

Accomplishments and what we learned

None of us had built a Google Chrome extension before, so it was quite the learning experience.

What's next for Penguin Desk

Penguin Desk was initially going to have users log in to an account so that we could store data such as their personal information and previous help requests. We didn't have time to implement that, but it would have been nice to have.