Uni-fied

A social media service that aims to unify the blocks that make up our world - specifically in a university-based context. A digital tool that connects students to real-world connections.

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Inspiration

Other student’s complaints / discussions on social life within our university sparked our ideas for this product, as it gave us a specific issue we could tackle. Current services relevant to this topic such as the Sydney Uni app, Ed Discussion and other social media apps also inspired our solution, as we realised the convenience of centralising all the main benefits these apps have for university students in improving their social lives.

What it does

Enhances a university student's social life and focuses on expanding connections. Our product achieves this through five main features:

  • Posts: Allows users to make posts as well as comment and like on them. Invites can also be made here (e.g. study sessions other users can accept).
  • Timetable: Allows users to add their timetable and see others in the same classes as them, which they can connect with by sending a request.
  • Map: Shows nearby users to connect with, alongside potential invites that are connected to posts.
  • Societies: Shows society events relevant to the user’s degree and interests. Also allows users to create communities, which are groups based on specific interests.
  • People: Can view chats as well as current friends. Also shows recommended people based on availability and free time of users.

This product aims to make it easier for students to make friends within the university specifically in a more holistic approach, making it so that connections can be made at every part of a student’s campus life (e.g. tutorials, society events, study sessions). (All features can be made public or private depending on the user).

How we built it

Claude was used to assist in developing a prototype for this service. Prior to this, extensive discussion and brainstorming was done to carve out a more defined plan of what the prototype should look like, including the UI, overall layout, specific features and general user experience. A specific colour palette was chosen to reflect elements of our university (i.e. the orange-red) whilst maintaining a distinct look of its own, and the logo was created through Canva.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to determine how exactly to start developing a social media website due to our lack of experience but ultimately we were able to eventually build a working prototype with the assistance of AI. It was also challenging trying to define more clearly the specific features we wanted our site to have without making them too open-ended, but we managed to narrow them down to around 5 main features that we collectively agreed would be the most practical and useful for our target user (university students), making the prototype easier to envision and implement.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud of the fact we were all able to brainstorm and implement a solution for the given theme under the provided time conditions, especially our efforts in creating the prototype and pitch. We were able to communicate effectively with each other about our visions and expectations for the product allowing us to build a service we were all satisfied with, and tasks were delegated well throughout the group to ensure that all members were contributing equally, maximising our efficiency.

What we learned

As this was our first hackathon, we learnt the difficulty of attempting to build a prototype for the first time. While we relied mostly on AI assistance for the prototype of this hackathon, we hope for future events we will be able to attempt building more of the prototype from scratch, as that would likely make it easier to customise and scale the code over time.

What's next for Uni-fied

In future, we would like to reattempt at building Uni-fied using less AI assistance and improve the prototype to hold more unique, effective and clean features. Additionally, it would be preferable for an app version of this product to be developed some time in the future once this is completed, as apps provide a much more convenient and accessible pathway for users. Some of the UI may also be redesigned for a more polished look.

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