Bloomly | Devpost

Inspiration 💡

Promoting Inclusivity and Equality
Filling a Gap in Online Spaces (reducing the lack of dedicated online platforms that specifically cater to the needs of the community)
Empowering Community Voices
Combating Isolation and Loneliness
Providing Resources and Support for their voice
Creating a Positive Online Experience

What it does 🤔

People could chat with one other
They could post blogs.
FAQ Sections
Micro Social Network

How we built it ⚙️

React.js on the front-end with styling done in Material UI
Firebase for OAuth
Socket.io for Chat
Node + Express for Backend
Figma, Photoshop and After Effects for designing & crafting assets

Design 🎨

We were heavily inspired by the revised version of Double Diamond design process, which not only includes visual design, but a full-fledged research cycle in which you must discover and define your problem before tackling your solution & then finally deploy it.

Double-Diamond

Discover: a deep dive into the problem we are trying to solve.

Define: synthesizing the information from the discovery phase into a problem definition.

Develop: think up solutions to the problem.

Deliver: pick the best solution and build that.

Moreover, we utilized design tools like Figma, Photoshop & Illustrator to prototype our designs before doing any coding. Through this, we are able to get iterative feedback so that we spend less time re-writing code.

Challenges we ran into 😤

We built the whole project from scratch which involved crafting a ton of UI components which we had to plug in with the backend. Furthermore, we invested a lot of time in finetuning the whole UX flow later on which did unnecessarily consumed a bit of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of ✨

We are proud of finishing the project on time which seemed like a tough task as we started working on it quite late due to other commitments. We were also able to add most of the features that we envisioned for the app during ideation. And as always, working overnight was pretty fun! :)

This project was a notable accomplishment for us because it presented a unique experience compared to other generic hackathons. We engaged in thorough brainstorming and extensive research, which culminated in a satisfying sense of accomplishment upon successfully completing the project.

What we learned 🙌

Proper sleep is very important! :p Well, a lot of things, both summed up in technical & non-technical sides. Also not to mention, we enhanced our googling and Stackoverflow searching skills during the hackathon :)

What's next for Bloomly 🚀

We believe that our App has great potential. We just really want this project to have a positive impact on people's lives! We would love to make it more scalable & cross-platform so that the user interaction increases to a great extent. Additionally, we intend to continue improving the UI & integrating specialized features for an even more premium experience.