KoHi | Devpost

Inspiration ☕

"Kohi" is the Japanese word for coffee, but we pronounce it as 'Kō-Hi to imitate a friendly greeting.

As first-year engineering students, we realised the very apparent gap in practical knowledge and experience among young motivated professionals. For those underrepresented in technology or those without proper access to technological literacy, the biggest roadblock is the lack of access to resources like mentorship and community. Our main goal is to facilitate networking and encourage personal branding and creativity.

What it does 🤔

KoHi lets users create a personalized coffee shop, complete with a menu that acts as their resume, and browse through other professionals' shops in their area to 'match' with mentors, mentees, and peers for coffee chats. Our virtual coffee shop acts like a self-contained metaverse for the users. The chat and calendar feature makes connecting and scheduling both efficient and inviting. The ability to view your matches' availability makes it easy to create a no-conflict schedule while getting the most out of coffee chats. Users can expand their coffee shops and add personal touches while waiting for 'customers' to buy a coffee from them in order to become a part of their professional network. The nature of KoHi encourages a judgement-free zone, where matches are solely based on professional compatibility as opposed to other superficial factors. The organized messages and notifications inbox, as well as collaborative calendar, streamline the networking process substantially and we hope that KoHi attracts eager students and professionals unsure of where to start.

How we built it ⚙️

We used Blender to model a 3D coffee shop, Evercast to collaborate on our 3D model, and Figma to create an app prototype showcasing our model and the aforementioned features. We used Outflow to wireframe and Motion plug-in to animate our icons and logos.

We conducted two moderated usability testing sessions, transcribed and compiled on Miro. The first session was using low fidelity wireframes, and we primarily tested for user flow and intuition on CTAs. We used the qualitative and quantitative data to build a fully working prototype and conducted A/B testing. With this second round, we were able to be confident in our design decisions and ensure that we were designing with inclusivity in mind.

Challenges we ran into 💪

Learning how to model realistic 3D objects in Blender with the correct lighting and textures was definitely a technical learning experience and took us some time to get used to. Moreover, planning out the user flow for KoHi required more research and testimonials from our target audience, which we had to obtain relatively quickly.

Usability testing flagged issues in accessibility, particularly for those with less technological literacy. We made many design iterations to test UI components. However, these challenges proved to be crucial to the improvements made to our app prototype.

Accomplishments that we're proud of ⭐️

As a team, we have a professional background in software, we’re proud that we took the step into product design. Our familiarity with AutoCAD helped with the learning curve into Blender, which we think elevated our idea past simply a mobile app.

What we learned 📚

Learning user experience, interaction design, and interface planning taught us a lot about how to empathize with users. One of our key takeaways was the understated importance of defining our problem space. While we all recognized the issue in our community and in the less fortunate, it was difficult to pinpoint exactly what would optimize our solution. We had to overcome subconscious biases as we are technologically fluent. We learned new tools, collaborated for our first in-person hackathon, and came up with a project that we’re truly proud of.

What's next for KoHi 📈

Moving forward, this prototype is ready for cross-functional deployment and responsive design. Developing the mobile app and expanding our virtual coffee town are the first steps to building our community.