horizen.

Login Page
Task Generator (Gemini)
Task List
Task Galaxy

Inspiration

We were inspired by a frustrating reality for many project managers: project management being more challenging than the project itself. Project managers understand the importance of meeting deadlines, yet often, by the time tasks are broken down and communication channels are established, half the deadline has already elapsed. Moreover, administrative tasks — such as keeping everyone synchronized, generating emails, scheduling meetings, and marking tasks as complete — consume valuable time intended for direct project work.

That’s why we built horizen.: a solution to keep teams aligned, ensuring projects are completed and deadlines are met.

What it does

horizen. leverages AI to decompose projects into manageable tasks, which can then be directly assigned to employees. Project managers can notify relevant team members (via Email, Discord, or Meetings) using artificially generated prompts tailored to task details, while still retaining full control over the content. Additionally, managers can monitor individual employee progress and the team’s overall advancement.

This functionality is wrapped in a UI modeled after a solar system, where tasks are represented as planets. Our goal is to provide a single, efficient medium for managers to interact with their teams. Unlike competitors like Trello and Notion, which prioritize universal access to information, horizen. ensures relevant data is accurately transmitted to the appropriate individuals. This enables project managers to oversee workloads and assign tasks in the shortest time possible.

How we built it

Frontend

React JS: Serves as the primary UI library, utilizing functional components and React hooks (useState, useEffect, useMemo) for state management, side effects, and memoization.
Vite: Employed as our build tool, providing rapid HMR during development, significantly accelerating the iteration cycle.
Framer Motion: Integrated for fluid animations, particularly to simulate planetary orbits in our solar system-themed mind map visualization, enhancing user engagement.
Tailwind CSS: Applied for styling with utility-first classes, ensuring a responsive and cohesive cosmic-themed design across devices.

Backend & APIs

Firebase - Firestore: Besides real-time synchronization ensuring data consistency across the application, manages persistent storage of task and user data, structured as: > Task details: { name, description, priority, dueDate } > User information: { name, role, email, profilePicture } > Assignment relationships and task statuses: { assignedTo, status (e.g., pending, in-progress, completed) }
Google Generative AI (Gemini 2.0 Flash): Powers AI-driven content generation for emails and messages, integrated via secure API key authentication, with custom prompt engineering to align outputs with task-specific requirements.
EmailJS: Facilitates email dispatch with a robust API, supporting dynamic template rendering based on task and user data.
Discord Webhook: Facilitates email dispatch with a robust API, supporting dynamic template rendering based on task and user data.

Challenges we ran into

Given the tight timeline, integrating Firebase across all functions and pages proved challenging, requiring meticulous error handling and schema validation. Similarly, achieving consistent output from the Gemini API demanded iterative prompt tuning and fallback mechanisms. Additionally, since the scope of horizen. was conceptually so big, it was difficult to narrow down the endless possible features we envisioned to what we deemed was most relevant and possible to achieve in 48 hours.

This project helped us realize how difficult it is to create an innovative project, we had to dig deep to ask ourselves what each of us would like to see in a project management app and how to put a spin on it. We also had to ask ourselves how we a small group of 4 could improve on project management apps that are backed by big companies by looking at our unique experiences and preferences.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our overall UI and design and how everything is more or less integrated seamlessly. We're also proud that despite working on different computers and having different visions, we were able to fit into one theme that blends together nicely. Especially since this was our first time using firebase we’re proud that we are close to a working product than a lot of people and building horizen. further isn’t a far fetched reality.

What we learned

We learned how important it is to divide the workflow evenly and have good communication to ensure our components don't conflict with each other. We also got a taste of how to not get overambitious with ideas and plan effectively given the skill set of the group and time given. Last but not least, we learned how to sacrifice what we want for the overall success of the group, Many times we had ideas that conflicted with one another and it was important that someone gave up what they thought was the better idea so the group could continue and not waste time.

What's next for horizen.

We plan to enhance horizen. with advanced task features, such as integrating a Google Calendar API for automated meeting scheduling and enabling chat/file-upload communication between managers and employees. Building on AI-driven efficiency, these features could include AI-recommended messages or schedules to optimize project completion timelines.