🌟 Inspiration 🌟
The inspiration for the UMass Live Onboarding Tracker came from the need to simplify and streamline the onboarding process, focusing on both students and advisors. Many incoming students feel overwhelmed by the numerous tasks they must complete, from transcripts and tests to health insurance and orientation. At the same time, advisors need better tools to monitor students' progress, spot issues early, and help those struggling with specific tasks. By integrating data visualization and real-time updates, this project aims to create an efficient onboarding experience for students while enabling advisors to provide targeted support and optimize the onboarding process.
📝 What it does ✅
The UMass Live Onboarding Tracker empowers students to track their onboarding tasks, ensuring they complete each step before starting university. Tasks like submitting transcripts, completing tests, enrolling in insurance, and attending orientation are all covered. Advisors can monitor students' progress in real time, identify those who need additional support, and efficiently manage groups based on data insights. This dual functionality helps everyone stay on track and enables advisors to support students more effectively throughout the onboarding process.
🛠️ How we built it 💻
This web application was developed using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python (FastAPI), with a JSON database for efficient data management. To streamline coding challenges, we turned to ChatGPT as a resource, helping us troubleshoot issues and improve efficiency. The app features a student dashboard with checkboxes for each task and displays real-time progress. Advisors have access to a data visualization dashboard, making it easy to monitor student groups and intervene when needed. The responsive design ensures usability across devices, allowing everyone to track onboarding progress effortlessly.
🤔 Challenges we ran into 🚧
We faced multiple challenges in making the app accessible and efficient for both students and advisors. Crafting an intuitive, responsive layout that performs well on all devices was essential. Integrating real-time progress tracking while keeping the app lightweight required careful optimization. Additionally, we wanted the tool to be useful not only for students but also for advisors, expanding its capabilities so advisors can gain insights from the captured data. Working on these challenges, we found that ChatGPT was invaluable in brainstorming solutions, troubleshooting code, and streamlining our work.
🎉 Accomplishments that we’re proud of ✨
We’re thrilled with the smooth, user-friendly experience we created for students, allowing them to monitor their onboarding progress with ease. The real-time tracker motivates students to complete each task and stay on schedule. For advisors, the data visualization tool provides an efficient way to monitor students and help those who need support. Seeing both sides of this tool work together successfully is something we’re really proud of!
📚 What we learned 💡
This project taught us the importance of user-centric design and balancing simplicity with functionality. We learned to optimize each checklist item to make the app clear and intuitive, while also providing all the necessary steps. Developing dynamic, responsive layouts and implementing real-time tracking were invaluable experiences. ChatGPT became a great resource for us, helping us solve coding challenges and offering insights for smoother functionality.
🚀 What's next for UMass Live Onboarding Tracker 📈
In the future, we plan to implement personalized notifications for students, reminding them of upcoming tasks. For advisors, we’ll add more advanced analytics and reporting capabilities, allowing them to track group progress even more efficiently and generate reports that can support student success and ongoing improvements to the onboarding experience.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.