Inspiration
While our team was brainstorming and trying to cook up an idea, we were researching more info about etfs and so on, then suddenly on my screen came a POP-UP! It was for a very unique shirt garage was selling and I just couldn't stop thinking about it. Then I realized my attention span was awful and sometimes the only was to catch my eye is to throw some flashy colors on my screen with cool visuals. Unfortunately, this also goes for my ability to put time and attention into things that are pretty important. So our team took inspiration from that pop-up! As waterloo co-op students we're in an intense search for a co-op so we're always applying to jobs. However, we don't often think about our plan post-co-op a.k.a. what to do with our savings. As much as it is important and we need to learn about it, we just don't have the attention span to sit down and research it.
What it does
So how exactly does our idea help that issue of the doomed gen z attention span? What our idea does is lurk on sunlife's career site. When someone tries to apply for an internship job, a pop-up with our goose friend appears on their screen asking them if they know what to do with the money they'll make during that term. Then when the user unavoidably clicks "no" it takes them to this hacked middle-man temporary site where they must answer some questions resembling our generations beloved personality quizzes. Their responses have been coded to lead to an investment plan which would suit their needs best.
How we built it
Our team broke down responsibilities where my partner worked on the visuals and mocked layouts of our vision using Figma and sketch operations to play out the consequences of each click to our pop-up. Then for backend, I pure coded it using HTML, deployed the connecting quiz-site using GitHub and Netlify.
Challenges we ran into
Our challenges consisted of mental roadblocks, where we had an end goal and vision for the result though we kept on getting stuck during brainstorm how to uniquely carry that out. As well as the issue of time management, being given a quantity of time seeming quite large while in reality no where near enough time to get each aspect implemented, caused us to fall behind schedule and so on. Lastly we also had an issue deciding what aesthetic to make the quiz, considering this is a hackathon we eventually ended up going for a glitchy, jittery, "you got hacked" vibes to continue the mysterious draw to wanting to complete the quiz rather than a formal SunLife API.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud that we have a finished product to showcase, and we're proud of our idea. At times its hard to bring ideas to life but we believe we executed it quite well for what we were expecting. Although we were only a 2-woman team, we are very proud of the soul that we put into it, watching it be built from the ground up. The contest was initially daunting as majority of our competitors are in math or CS, though we're only first-year engineering, particularly chemical not an engineering where we are taught a lot about web development and so on, thus we're very proud of our final product.
What we learned
We learned a lot about troubleshooting and how to approach technical issues from a million different facets before giving up because sometimes it really is just a ';' missing in the most random place. As well for brainstorming, we learned that no thought is too small and great ideas are sometimes built from useless tangents.
What's next for You've been goosed
At the moment, our program is only targeted towards one aspect of what SunLife has to offer, investment plans. Potentially we would expand on our idea and see how we can implement a draw to their insurance plans.
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