Stargaze

Inspiration

How can we connect people across cultures? There’s one thing that is the same, regardless of where you live, and where you come from. Love is one of the few things that can transcend boundaries of language, of borders–and that’s why we created Stargaze. To help people find their matching star regardless of their differences–with a special emphasis on peoples personalities in order to develop a genuine connection. Using star signs and the 16 personality test, our solution recommends matches based on zodiac and personality compatibility.

What it does

Historically, dating apps have been catered towards men–only 19% of women having had good experiences, a stark contrast to 43% of men. Additionally 46% of women report boring chat conversations, due to bad personality matches. Stargaze’s use of the 16 personality test to find compatibility is a major difference from other dating apps. Knowing your personality code can help understand how you view the world and how your mind processes information, so meeting someone who is compatible with your code can help you communicate about what’s important to you since your minds naturally understand each other. The zodiac signs are a fundamental part of the app as well–lots of women like the idea of astrological compatibility, so naturally, wanting to target women for this app, we added astrological compatibility as well.

How we built it

Stargaze is built using Figma, a design prototyping platform. All three of us were new to using Figma, so there was a significant learning curve in understanding how the app worked–but once it clicked we were able to develop a prototype much faster.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we faced was the layering of frames in Figma–along with linking certain buttons to certain actions. Many times after one overlay occurred, it was difficult to get the next click to work. Additionally we were not used to the way linking worked--seeing all the different connections was extremely confusing. We also realized that copying and pasting something that already had attributes attached to it would mean those attributes are still connected to the new copied component.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although this was difficult, we were finally able to figure it out, and in the end created an application that we can say we are definitely proud of. Stargaze is able to solve our problem statement–and represents a dating an app that is targeted towards women and values personality, along with including tenets of astrology. All three of us can safely say, this is an app we would use ourselves.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to use Figma, and also just generally how rapid prototyping works. This was our first time really creating an application from scratch, and learning about how to use components, how to create shapes, how to connect external applications to Figma–all of that was new information that we can now take with us in our major.

What's next for Stargaze

So what’s next for Stargaze? At the moment we are using Stargaze as a learning tool–we’ve taken so much experience with us from creating the application. But in the future, maybe Stargaze will go live, and people all around the world can make connections crossing hurdles and barriers–so keep an eye out!

Built With

• figma