gatormeet

create poll page
vote page
welcome page

Inspiration

If you've ever used when2meet to schedule anything, you'll understand why we made this web application. When2meet is a scheduling app that does the job, but we believe it has room for improvement. We found that it isn't very user-friendly, and that the UI could be prettier. Therefore, our team wanted to make something more intuitive and easy on the eyes. It started out as a scheduling app, but we ended up providing more functionality for the options (explained below) and it became more of a polling app.

What it is used for

This is for when you have a couple of options that you want people to choose between. We intended it for meetings, where you would put in a couple of dates/times and send to your intended audience to decide upon. However, the best thing about this app is that you can use it for anything. Those options could be for your friend group to decide between Among Us and Super Mario for game night. It could be for a parent-teacher conference that needs to be set up.

How to use it

You go to the home page and have the option of entering an ID and voting, or creating a new poll. If you enter an ID, it will take you directly to a page where you can select some options. After you submit your responses, it will take you to a results page. Otherwise, you can create a poll, plug in some options you want your team to chose from, and a pop-up with your ID will show up. That's the same ID others will use to vote on your poll.

How we built it

A lot of willpower! Well, for the coding process, we first started out with some wireframes. We wanted to figure out the flow of the app and after that, we set up our Github repo with our Angular frontend and Firebase backend. Then, the team split up 50-50 and started working. The frontend team focused on routing, buttons and style, while the backend team worked on forming the database. Finally, the 2 teams connected and worked together to merge the parts.

Challenges we ran into

It's always the little things. There were a couple of typos that took a while to notice, but the main struggles came from making sure the database worked, and from working out the HTML. As intuitive as bootstrap is, you always have to make sure it's included in the dependencies correctly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting so much done in such a small amount of time!! Creating a website is no easy task for a team of mostly novices. It takes a lot of hard work, focus, research and communication for everything to come together. Also, the team really enjoyed the learning process and seeing features get done.

What we learned

We all learned a lot more in-depth about Firebase and Angular. The entire team feels a lot of love for npm and we hope it continues to be this amazing forever. Next time, we'll know to make the most of the resources available, like the mentors and documentation.

What's next for gatormeet

The very first thing is having more options! We want for users to potentially add in their "options", if allowed by the creator. Something else that would be pretty cool is to be able to directly put in a link, rather than have an ID. We believe that would make it much easier for users.