Sincerely,

xeno, n. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.

In a world ruled by spontaneity, how can we find room for purposeful interaction?

Inspiration

Sincerely is all about rethinking the way we connect with other humans. Our platform encourages purposeful interaction, and embraces the idea that even the most transient of moments can become some of our most treasured memories.

Our team reminisced back to the days of when we much younger -- making fast friends only to never see them again. Maybe you played House with them for an afternoon. Maybe your families sat next to each other on a long train ride. Maybe you were both on voice call for a game together and they never came online again. These interactions seem insignificant, yet our group members found themselves recalling them in vivid and positive detail. However small they may have been in the grand scheme of things, they were just good times.

As adult living in the 21st century, these kinds of meaningful, yet fleeting moments are rare. Meet someone that you really enjoyed talking to? You can get their phone number and the interaction will never be lost! Only have a picture of someone? You can leverage the power of social media and there's a good chance that they'll be able to find the person.

With the popularity of smartphones, social media, and a million other that demand our attention, we are more connected than ever. But what can we say about these connections? What does it mean to go on vacation and post photos for your network of followers to like? If there is a speaker whose ideas I enjoy, I can follow them and tune into their every message. The common theme with these developments is that connection has become depersonalized. When I receive a message, there's a good chance that someone else got the exact same one. Our generation may interact with more people in their lifetimes than in any other time in human history, but what can we say about the quality of those connections. As we become more connected to one another, do we become yet more distant?

Sincerely hopes to bring one-time, deliberate, interactions back into the mainstream. When you send a photo or type a message, it is only meant for one and only one person. We decided to settle on the idea of exchanging postcards to achieve this. For as long as printing has existed, people have sent postcards to each other as a way of sharing what they're up to and letting the recipient know that they are thinking of them.

We hope to bring this idea to more people by combining the best parts of physical post cards -- the deliberateness, personalization, and thoughtfulness -- with the accessibility offered by a digital medium.

As we continue to emerge out of Covid-19 pandemic, we hope this platform will also encourage more people to not only travel but share their experiences on a personal level with another random stranger. There is so much to gain by traveling and we hope that through hearing about other's journeys, Sincerely will inspire more people to get out into the world and find something that excites them!

User Personas

User Flow

What it does

At its core, Sincerely allows users to send digital postcards and messages to random strangers around the world. Users obtain physical postcards in their real-world travels and must scan them into Sincerely for digital sending. Once uploaded, they are prompted to write a message about the postcard they chose and the story behind it. Once the user hits send, the postcard is "shipped" off to another user of the platform.

To emulate the delay in transporting physical postcards and create some suspense for the user, postcards are not delivered immediately are instead scheduled for delivery based on the physical distance from the site of the postcard and the home city of the recipient.

As users send and receive more postcards, they may view all of the locations they have sent and received post cards from on a map!

Technical User Flow

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are immensely proud of the work we've done to iterate on this idea. We started with a mass-postcard sharing system that was more akin to a social media site. However, we eventually honed in on the idea of promoting individual connection that is more deliberate.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge that we faced was staying true to our central value of wanting to stand out from the typical forms of social media while also attempting to bridge the gap between travelers and non-travelers. However, after a lot of deliberation, we decided to keep interactions between sender and user very simple in order to maintain an enjoyable experience.

We challenged ourselves to use new technologies that we hadn’t before, such as Auth0 and fastAPI as opposed to technologies we had more experience with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our idea for the app was fairly fleshed out, even if we weren’t able to implement it in its entirety. We’re really proud of our idea, and hope to take it further.

What we learned

One of our goals was to get experience with as many different technologies as possible. However, we quickly found that mixing and matching different software from different vendors was tricky.