Syntro [in person]

Inspiration

With the overwhelming amount of information that a typical student consumes a day, there arises a lack of coherence between the various domains of their life. These scattered thoughts, ideas, and the connections between them may be lost into the void, resulting in identity disconnect and academic burnout. This gives us an opportunity to help students synthesize fragmented academic and personal information into a unified space to improve clarity, coherence, and synergy.

What it does

Syntro is an intelligent workspace that transforms a young scholar’s scattered mess of data into a unified “Life Map”. Unlike traditional note-taking or file organization tools, Syntro acts as a multiscale synthesis engine that highlights high-level concepts and visualizes connections between them. It works from micro (e.g., individual class topics) to macro-level topics (e.g., career paths and personal identity).

How we built it

User Research

To gain a deeper understanding of our problem, we scanned posts on online forums, dove into literature reviews, and created a survey that we sent out to our target user group.

Wireframing & Prototyping

We used Notability to sketch wireframes and Figma to create our lo-fi, mid-fi, and hi-fi mockups.

Challenges we ran into

One of the first challenges we faced was simply deciding on an idea. We had a broad problem space around student overwhelm and scattered information, but narrowing that down into a clear, focused concept that we both aligned on took time. We went through multiple directions before landing on something that felt meaningful and actually solvable within the scope of the designathon.

Another challenge was designing the UI/UX while staying true to our core theme of clarity. Since our whole product is about reducing overwhelm and making connections visible, it was easy to accidentally design something that felt cluttered or confusing. We had to constantly step back and ask whether each element actually contributed to clarity or if it was just adding noise.

We also struggled with Figma itself. Since we both had limited prior experience, there were a lot of features we weren’t familiar with, which slowed down our workflow. Figuring out things like components, auto layout, and prototyping took trial and error, and sometimes we had ideas we couldn’t fully execute because we didn’t yet know how to use certain tools.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our solution idea, as well as how our final design turned out. However, despite all the challenges, we are most proud of all the skills we learned along the way.

What we learned

Through this process, we learned the importance of being intentional with every design decision by grounding it in what the user actually wants and needs. Rather than adding features for the sake of it, we focused on ensuring that each element contributed to clarity and supported the user’s experience.

We also developed practical skills in Figma, becoming more comfortable with tools such as components and variants. Learning how to use these features helped us create a more consistent and scalable design system while improving our overall workflow.

What's next for Syntro

Next, we plan to continue refining the design to further improve clarity, usability, and overall coherence. We also want to move into the evaluation stage by gathering user feedback, identifying pain points, and iterating on the design based on those insights. If time allows, we hope to begin implementing a functional version of the product ourselves to better test and validate the experience in practice.

Built With

• figma