Reinventing the social circles
While most of the business ideas generated during the pandemic fall under the category of “keeping the virus away from people,” we approached it with a vision that improves the quality of life. Socialite is an app that allows students from college to interact and motivate each other during the pandemic.
COVID Hackathon
Over the winter break of my first year at Georgia Tech, I was given the opportunity to participate in a Hackathon which is cohosted by Emory University and Georgia Tech. Each Hackathon team has to include members from both Emory and Georgia Tech.
Our team consists of 2 Emory students who are CS majors and 3 GT students who are CS, Industrial Design, and Biology majors. As an Industrial Design major, I was responsible for the UI/UX design of the app interface.
The theme of the Hackathon is simply COVID. The ultimate submission is to create a pitch in the form of a 5 minutes video that convinces and explains how and why our app, Socialite, works.
UI/UX Design
While designing the app’s interface, I have kept one question at the center of everything: how to turn complexity into simplicity. The app itself is very ambitious: we wanted to include everything in one place. However, I knew that no one would use something that takes a long learning curve. Therefore, an app with this many features cannot be complicated to use. With this general guidance in mind, I started designing the interface by thinking about priorities and combining elements together.
One common pain point that everyone shares during the pandemic is the lack of social life that one would typically experience. The app has four main features that provide a solution: communities, chats, maps, and tasks. These features allow users to connect with each other while maintaining safe social distancing guidelines. Users can connect with people who share similar interests and eventually meet offline using the map feature.
The Message tab is a central hub for our users to connect with each other. Users are able to find people that share similar interests in the related communities. Once they establish a connection with them, they are able to continue chatting with each other in the message tab.
The Map tab allows the users to clearly discover places with the least amount of people. Like Novid, the app uses Bluetooth and location to understand the number of people in the surrounding. When the number of people exceeds a certain limit, the app will notify the user that this place is not a safe area to enter.
The Tasks tab allows the users to keep track of their motivations and tasks while sharing them with their friends. One of the issues we found during quarantine is the lack of motivation to work. The tasks feature helps our users to stay focused on the goals by making these tasks a group incentive.
Final Submission
Below is the final submission video that our team created for the Hackathon. This video ultimately got us into the final round of the competition. Our team ended up being in the top 10 and received $1500 in prize.
