Remobi Toolkit

Remobi
Figma Mockups

Inspiration

When reflecting on prominent challenges and problems in our every day lives to brainstorm the idea for our Hackathon project, our team reflected on the difficulties of working from home. Over the last two years, remote work has become an increasingly significant part of our lives. But it certainly hasn’t become any easier, hey? Drawing upon our own experiences, as well as asking others around us, we compiled a significant list of problems, and selected the top 5 that we believe we could build a holistic solution for.

What it does

Remobi helps you truly feel at home while at work. It gives you tools to meet new people at your workplace and focus on tasks from the convenience of a chrome extension sitting right at the top of every tab you open! If you want wellbeing reminders, Remobi will send you notifications however you like, whether it be via phone messages or notification badges on the chrome extension icon itself. These include basics that can be easily forgotten when working from home, like drinking a glass of water every few hours, remembering to take a break and fixing your posture.

How we built it

Remobi runs on javascript which google chrome runs as a chrome extension. We used HTML and CSS for the design and layout of the extension. We use javascript to make API calls to a Python script which we hosted online to handle the features that require connecting with other users (as this feature can't be run locally). The code for that was written with Flask can be viewed here.

Challenges we ran into

Time management was definitely a significant challenge the Seaweed team encountered. Many of us had weekend commitments, and so were busy for the majority of the day, only being able to come together as a team during the evening/nights. To make the most of our time, we delegated different tasks so that we could work on them individually and update the team on our progress. Because we didn't have time to fully flesh out our code, we focused on Figma mockups to provide a bit of insight into the potential features and design of Remobi. These complement our code by showing what we would accomplish with a few more days of work and demonstrating the future of the Remobi Toolkit!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our ideation process to find a problem affecting a huge portion of the world and solve it with a scalable project idea. WFH is something we believe will persist even after the pandemic and by creating a very easily accessible product, like a chrome extension, we ensure that millions of users are able to use this large-scale solution to tackle the woes of working online. We are very happy with the state of our current designs. One of the biggest factors in determining the usage of chrome extensions is simplicity and intuitive design. By using brightly-coloured and clean pages within the extension, we hope users will be excited to open the extension each morning, and with the planned flexibility of notifications and quick note-taking abilities, we are striving to ensure users won't be bothered by the long loading times of a website or app.

What we learned

With half of our group having work and meetings throughout the entire weekend, we were left with significantly less time to spend on the hackathon. We learnt how to overcome these severe scheduling issues and ensure that even without extensive code, we could still mockup an intuitive and creative design.

We learnt a lot about the ideation and problem solving, which we initially struggled with due to the lack of a robust theme for the competition. By sitting in call for hours talking about the problems in our own lives, we realised that there were so many issues we could tackle and wrote everything down until we struck an idea that we were really excited to work on!

What's next for Remobi Toolkit

In the future, we want to work on the code for Remobi to make it easily distributed between people in multiple companies. We want to add a company feature to allow users to schedule meetings with users in their own company as currently the API puts all the users in the same database.

We also want to work on the notifications for our wellbeing features by integrating the Twilio API to give users notifications directly on their phone if they wish. We also want notification badges on the extension to let users know they have unread wellbeing notifications without disturbing them.

There are plenty of other features we are keen on integrating but the last big one to cover is support for pagination in our quick-notes feature. This would allow users to view all their notes over several pages and decide whether they want to copy the note or delete it. We also want to add support for auto-deleting temporary notes if users want to after a specified amount of time.