Inspiration
Although many cities try to improve their local communities by having various volunteer and community events, these seem to be more short-term based and only targeting these short term goals. Alternatively, we wanted to focus on the long-term benefits that our product could bring to the local community. By slowly working on one task at a time, each person has the potential to impact a whole community. Although each small task doesn't seem significant at first, the accumulation of the tasks is so much greater.
We are not limiting the tasks to simple tasks for the community as a whole, but also remembering that the community would not exist without everyone in it. We simply want to make helping each other as easy as possible - these might include simple tasks as picking up groceries for someone who has difficulty walking or a little more difficult tasks like guiding a blind resident to the hospital for checkups.
What it does
Essentially, this is a huge To-Do list for the local community. By having a queue of all the things that our local community needs and checking off each item off that list, both the community and individual have the satisfaction of accomplishing something and helping the better good. People of the community can submit tasks that they personally need or they think the community would need and this would get put into the pool in the Discover page where people who are looking to help can find work to do.
Challenges we ran into
Because we had such limited time, we weren't able to get to the back-end of the code. We weren't able to store individual data sets or create multiple users and test around with those users. Instead, we had to resort to coding most of it in front-end and testing it with a single user. In addition, there were many features from our ideas list that we had to cut out due to the limitations of time.
Also, while building out the product, we would often find use cases that would go against our original thoughts. For example, we ran into a case where someone could abuse the system by saying that they've completed the task, when in reality, they only half-completed it. We quickly came up with solutions to prevent these abuse from happening by having a "Review Section" in the main homepage. However, there were some unique use cases that we decided to ignore for our MVP, since time was our biggest constraint. We took note of these additional concerns and features we could implement for our next release in the "Additional Features List" section in our Features Spec documentation (attached as a Google Doc link below)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud to say that there is not a single direct competitor for our idea. While trying to conduct the competitive analysis on the market for community to-do lists, we discovered that there are actually no to-do lists for communities. Most were focused on to-do lists for individuals or project management based lists.
In addition, we are very proud of the detailed documentation that we have for our product, given the limited time that we had. This is because we spent a good chunk of time solidifying our ideas and wire-framing them before diving right in. By having a bottom up strategy of solid base and adding features on top of the base, we were able be aligned with in our code and vision. And with our agile sprint model of 1.5 hour sprints with 30 minute meetings in between, we were able to iterate and efficiently finish our features in time for QA and design review.
What we learned
We learned that we should not underestimate the power of having solid foundations. It is a better time investment to spend more time creating a solid architecture for our code than to have something down and going back to edit it. Solid foundations make for solid additions.
What's next for TogetherWe
Since we have finished the MVP, we are hoping to take this further and implement the other list of features that we brainstormed in the beginning. These include: reporting tasks for app abuse, notifications for users (email, SNS, in-app), incorporating Toggl as a time-tracker for each task, being able to change the x-axis for Overview pages, being able to add attachments to tasks, commenting after finishing a task, commenting after rejecting a task, upvoting or reacting to a task, searching for particular tasks or users, an IOU section in Profile for people who have done you favors, and more!
Additional Notes
Business Potential:
By partnering with nearby restaurants and local/global companies, we could have these partners sponsor us with gift cards and reward points for people to trade in their hours for certain items. This would bring a much greater incentive for individuals who don’t know what to do with their free time - they could simply donate a few hours of their day to help their local community and earn gift cards for eCommerce sites or local restaurants. In addition, this would also bring a more positive light to the business partner’s image and they could use it as a marketing strategy - i.e. “We partnered with TogetherWe to build stronger communities and support giving back.”
Many companies in the industry have been making greater efforts in giving back to the society, so partnering with TogetherWe would be a great implementation into the programs. For example, many companies have a paid-volunteer day once a month, quarter, or year. With certain number of hours accumulated in TogetherWe, they could trade in those hours for bonuses or even substitution for getting out of those paid volunteer days.
TogetherWe could also be incorporated as part of these Volunteer Days. Each team could tackle a task with a significant number of hours and workforce needed and work together to complete the task for the community. This would promote teamwork within the company teams - working together to get the task done as efficiently and effectively as possible - as well as benefit the communities where the employees work and live - all the while, getting paid with hourly points. This is just a win-win for all!
Bugs we are aware of:
- Users cannot go back to the previous page - the only way to go to a different page is by clicking on a different page in the navigation or clicking one of the main buttons
- Edits are not permanent in the database because we do not have a backend database at the moment - time constraints → local storage of data/information
- The “Sort By” functionality in Discover page does not actually work - it moves objects around and looks like it is there, but does not properly sort according to its fields
- Minor bugs when checking buttons in Discover, it does not carry over to the permanent state
- Users can’t re-click on a navigation page that they are already on; they have to click on a different page then click back to the page that they want
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