Touch Grass

Touch Grass helps break the "Seattle Freeze" by making it easier for UW students to form stronger friendships. Let’s thaw the freeze together!

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Inspiration

As we brainstormed ideas, we all related to the struggle of making friends at the UW campus. Especially since UW is known for its intense academic rigor, students can feel dejected when new friendships continuously die out. As we pulled up Reddit posts of other satellites experiencing similar feelings, and we came up with the idea of creating a solution to tackle the "Seattle Freeze".

What it does

Seattle has a notorious reputation for being very standoff-ish and cold, especially when it comes to making new friends. This concept is unheard of in other regions of the US (typically the south) hence why the term 'Seattle Freeze' was coined to express this vibe. With Touch Grass, we're making it easier for students to break the ice and bond. Our app helps students build real friendships by connecting them in random group chats, encouraging users to attend events together, and turning those digital social interactions into meaningful in-person connections!

How we built it

We started off brainstorming common pain points and issues UW Seattle students encounter as they attempt to create friendships on campus. After assessing these pain points, we came up with 3 effective solutions to target them and dove straight into research, market analysis, and prototyping. Lastly, we organized our problem statement, created a branding for the project, and continued to iterate on the developing live site.

Challenges we ran into

Adjusting the scope of our project: Initially, we aimed to target all Seattle residents with our app to address the 'Seattle Freeze' on a broader level. However, as we gathered more insights from our target users, we realized the need to narrow our focus to just UW students for now. This allows us to refine and adapt the app’s features to more effectively solve their specific needs, rather than spreading ourselves thin with multiple underdeveloped features. Additionally, we faced challenges in finding ways to translate o=all of our designs into working code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the site mostly built out! This was one of our biggest worries but we put our heads together and learned how to work with new tools such as Next.js, Typescript, CSS, Figma, and the product development cycle.

What's next for Touch Grass

We aim to next expand to integrate more university-specific features to aid in on-campus community building (such as RSO directories). Later we hope to further expand out ot other universities and eventually to all Seattlites!

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