Inspiration
Stockton, a city located in the San Joaquin county, is known for many things: the Asparagus festival, the University of the Pacific, the San-Joaquin Delta, and much more. One thing most people don’t know about Stockton though, is its diversity. Stockton is rated by U.S. News as the most diverse city in the United States, and with that comes many advantages and disadvantages. If you were to take a trip to Stockton, you would immediately notice the various cultures and ethnic “hot-spots” located in Stockton, where you can buy products and hot food from various different cultures, but one problem foreigners to that culture may run into is the language barrier. Oftentimes, many of these shops are owned by families who are first generation immigrants who speak limited English, with items that have no English on them, making it very difficult for people who do not understand that language to purchase items there.
What it does
Because of the information mentioned in our Inspiration, our group decided to make a webapp to help people more effectively understand how to browse these small ethnic grocery stores. Our app solves this by providing a picture of that item, its name in the original language, and a translated name to a language which the user can read. With this, our app makes it easier for people to experience products from the many different cultures located in Stockton, perhaps leading them to go to stores they would otherwise wouldn’t go to because they feel out of place there. Store owners can sign up to be “Vendors” on our app, where they can update their inventory list online, changing pictures, changing prices, and changing names. If the item does not already exist, they can press a button and create a new listing for that product. Customers can browse these stores on our app from the comfort of their home and see what products interest them without any confusion as a result of a language barrier.
How we built it
This webapp was built using HTML and CSS with Javascript as the backend. We used some example pictures of products found from Google to represent our example shop.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest challenges we ran into was learning how to use Javascript to get info from our HTML forms, and likewise, figuring out how to display Javascript info in our HTML. Some of our members also did not know CSS and HTML and had to learn it in the limited timeframe provided.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We feel good about the overall design of our website, being very clean and sleek, and what we believe to be user-friendly. Right now, our main pages are in English, but our design on the pages make it very easy to add support for different languages. Most pages we managed to finish are fully functional, which to us, was pretty impressive in the span of time we had to work on it.
What we've learned
We learned more about JavaScript and how to use it to run the backend of a website for something such as user authentication.
What's next for StockedIN
We plan to add more languages to the website (not the store pages), and improve our function for Vendors to update their listings as it is not fully functioning at the time that we submitted our project. Ideally, we would want to incorporate everything into a database for more efficiency and security purposes.
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