UniFind

UniFinds Cover

Inspiration

With the rise of fast fashion and overconsumption, many clothing pieces are produced, leaving many NCSSM students with large quantities of unwanted clothing. Instead of letting these clothes end up in landfills, we created a website where students can post clothing donations online and match with students who are interested in them. In addition, NCSSM is built upon a loving and trusting community, and students can also feel a sense of security in donating here. Although there are already thrifting options that exist, it can be difficult to work with these current methods due to travel constraints, scams, etc. We wanted to create a simple marketplace where students can not only easily post their clothing and descriptions, but also allow users to find them as well. Alongside the rapid growth of e-commerce, many people nowadays are familiar with shopping on the Internet, and our product can offer our users a similar experience to what they are already familiar with. While some students already have online clothing listings, it is difficult for sellers and buyers to come across each other since each seller is an individual, and it is difficult to reach audiences through self-promotion. By promoting their product, we can eliminate this issue.

What it does

Opening the website prompts you to either the donation page or the buying marketplace. Upon here, you can enter the marketplace to see images posted of all the available items that students are donating. If said student finds what they are looking for, they can select it, and they will be prompted to a disposable chat room where they can briefly contact the owners. Once an item has been given, the posting will disappear from the website. For users who are looking to donate their clothes, they will be prompted to take a picture of the item that they are selling and write a brief description of the item as well. Then the selling will go live on the main marketplace. The simple and intuitive nature of the website allows students to easily access and manage it.

How we built it

Our website is built on Replit. We developed a website using Python from Flask for the backend coding. The front end was constructed using HTML and CSS. We created a page that will direct the user to either a page that will have them upload a post for an item or a page where they can browse existing posts.

Challenges we ran into

Our team is made up of people with limited backgrounds and experiences in coding. Because of this, we spent a lot of our time learning how to create everything and troubleshooting to make it work. Our team divided up the work on several different documents, and therefore individually, everything was working smoothly. However, when it came time to compile the entire application together, it would not work. We spent a lot of time and hassle trying to combine it. Alongside this, something we didn’t anticipate was how much time it would take to fix issues. The time restraint of the project became stressful as we approached the deadline, and we worked as hard as possible to create fixes to the code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite running into many struggles and having to change different aspects of our project as we went forward, in the end, we were still able to produce a finalized project that was functional and presentable. Our application can have a real-world impact. If we spend a little more time and add some additional features, we can make UniFinds available for the NCSSM student body to use. Beyond just the hackathon, we can take our ideas and use them as the framework for almost anything. It benefits us as we build up our repertoire of knowledge, and inspires us to do more. Some members of our team were new to the software and coding languages we use today, and they managed to make large strides in learning and applying the knowledge too in just the short allotted time frame.

What we learned

Due to the nature and time crunch of the Hackathon, we learned a lot about what it means to work on a large project such as this in a short amount of time, and how to efficiently go about it. Instead of attempting to build a fully-fledged foundation of the application, we focused on a minimal and viable product where the user experience, motives, and needs were all made. Web designing! Only one of the members of our team had experience with web design, and our project mainly focused on web design. With the limited amount of time we had, we could only do so much while learning the process. Considering our limited experiences and backgrounds, it was difficult to map out and schedule ourselves since we didn’t know how long each section would take. Things we didn’t expect to be difficult took much longer than expected. From this, we learned that working on creative projects and exploring new territories requires a lot of patience and flexibility. We were able to take things that didn’t work well and adapt to create other methods and ideas in place of it. We also learned that sometimes it can be beneficial to reach out and ask for help from others too. Creating projects can cause so many issues to occur, and it can be refreshing to ask others for outside perspectives on issues and try methods in order to make things work.

What's next for UniFind

We have many new features we hope to incorporate, such as creating accounts for users, specializing the website for each location, including Morganton, and creating a personalized feed for users, showcasing items that fit their style. We hope to eventually deploy UniFinds on campus.