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Sneak peak of some widget features

Inspiration

There are a plethora of unwanted repercussions that are associated with working from home. Namely; excessive unproductivity due to distractions, as well as neglect of physical and mental wellbeing. These problems highlight the increasing level difficulty experienced when attempting to regulate a healthy work-rest balance, when trying to prevent overworking and procrastinating. Unfortunately, this leads to increased levels of stress and finally, burning out.

One of our team members personally works from home and finds it increasingly difficult to maintain all three aspects to a healthy standard - on the occasion becoming increasingly stressed, overworked and distracted. Through in-depth and lengthy brainstorming, we concluded that an innovative approach, offering work-enhancing features in the form of a dashboard, could potentially mitigate the amount of time wasted, while boosting overall physical and mental morale.

What it does?

We constructed the small startup idea WorkMate, which serves to provide assistance to its user by offering a large selection of tailored features (depending on the selected mode) such as; productivity timer, a joke API to put a smile on the user's face and, including but not limited to, a stretching routine.

In a nutshell, when you're about to commence online work, you'd open the WorkMate dashboard, and select the mode that best suits you at the time. Once that is done, you can then enable a range of handy features that can either boost productivity, or assist in increasing your overall wellness. There is no right or wrong use case of our product - that's why we believe it is not the classic "one size fits all," accommodating users from all walks of life.

In addition, we all come from backgrounds where helping individuals is not only a moral imperative, but an ever-growing passion of ours. Thus, we poured our heart and soul into developing a user-friendly working from home dashboard to the best of our ability.

How we built it?

Utilising HTML, CSS and Javascript, we crafted a website with multiple different web apps that when combined in unison, function together to be a fully-fledged dashboard service.

Challenges we ran into?

The greatest challenge we collectively faced was the lack of experience and absence of expertise within web development between our team. While most of us were well versed within object-oriented programming languages, we hadn’t really bothered to delve into web-development and only knew the basics. As a result, we had to ensure we were working 24/7, while recursively watching hundreds of tutorials and reading many, many more articles. This was not only physically demanding, but also mentally taxing, and thus it drastically impacted the scope of the project, as we had to cut out really creative ideas due to inexperience. Some of the ideas that never made it to production were:

Website Blocker: A widget that would disallow the user from browsing social media websites and other disruptive sites. It would block their request (or redirect it to a local IP) and appear with a funny gif to notify them to get back on track (depending on the website clicked).
Social Life Widget: This one was envisioned to get a list of nearby events and suggest them to the user based on their preferences, so that they could balance a social life. If the person was more introverted, we wanted to add a feature that would suggest a movie, or book to read - something that can be accomplished independently, with great satisfaction.
The rest are listed on the website under the ‘COMING SOON’ titles.

In addition, we were one team member short (3 members in total) due to the fourth team member having university assessments and assignments throughout the full length of the hackathon competition. This made it very difficult to complete all the things we would’ve liked to have implemented. It also forced us to work much harder, because we were significantly disadvantaged by being one short.

Furthermore, it was fairly difficult for us (the two backend developers) to implement scripts, as none of us were too familiar with Javascript. However, one of the backend developers is well-versed within java, so the syntax was not dissimilar. Although, the language was still very different, making idea implementation much harder than we anticipated, and the reliance on tutorials/courses (that taught the fundamentals of Javascript) much greater.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact that even, with the unfair odds of having one less team member and a very limited skill set, we pooled all our resources together and crafted an innovative solution. We successfully integrated multiple different features into one interactive, user friendly, and functional website from scratch. We believe this website, fully revamped and improved, can genuinely make working from home a lot easier.

What we learned?

We learned that teamwork is everything, and that having a team of strong individuals, with good work ethics, can make a world of a difference. Being able to rely on one another to implement certain aspects of our website meant that we could progress exponentially and we quickly developed a sense of comradeship.

In addition, by the end of the hackiethon, all of our web-development skills, particularly in relation to CSS and HTML, were drastically magnified. We now feel confident that we could produce websites with much more ease.

Furthermore, we developed more awareness surrounding the issue of working from home and extend our full support and care to those who are struggling during these difficult times.

What's next for WorkMate?

WorkMate aims to integrate more useful features and accessibility options in future so that users working from home can improve their productivity, physical and mental health - all within one single multi-functional website. We hope one day, when our skillsets have been improved and refined, the team can revisit the idea, and potentially market into a fully-functional web application to truly help those in need.