Hi5

Inspiration

COVID-19 was an event never before experienced in the modern age. For many, it was the first time experiencing stay-at-home mandates, wearing masks, and the monotonous loneliness of quarantine. As we are emerging from the end of the COVID tunnel and back into the fresh air of the former world, many challenges await. Of these, one of the most prominent and most socially impactful is the way people interact with each other since we have only interacted with others through Zoom and other video conferencing platforms for the past two years. Hi-5 is a revolutionary app that combines top aspects of successful social applications to make the return to face-to-face interaction much smoother and manageable.

What it does

At its core, Hi-5 connects people who are within a close proximity to each other by providing them a catalyst through which they can begin a conversation. When two users who both have the app installed are within a certain distance of each other, they receive a notification on their phone inviting them to meet the other user. The users are then able to begin a short chat, trade selfies of where they are and/or what they are wearing to make identification easier (images deleted afterward similar on SnapChat).

Users meet in person and chat with each other. After the meeting is over, both users are prompted to check in on their phone where they are given the ability to rate their interaction, report or block a user, or share connected social media accounts or phone numbers directly through the app to allow good conversations to continue. This can also be used as a measure of safety where someone gets notified if one or neither of the parties check in on their phone within a certain duration of the interaction being marked as over.

As the name suggests, Hi-5 meetings are intended to last five minutes (and the initial chat is also limited to five minutes), so they can slot into anyone’s schedule and are a great way to include socialization on a daily basis. This also allows for a quick out in the event that an interaction does not go smoothly. The app is not intended as a way for people to have long, drawn-out conversations, but rather help people make casual, day-to-day conversation with the people around them who are all in the same boat of trying to talk to people in person again after two years. If people are interested in keeping in touch after the initial interaction, they are able to share their social media handles or their phone numbers via the app.

How we built it

A great deal of the team’s time went into learning how to use React Native because none of us had prior mobile development experience.

Challenges we ran into

Learning how to code in a language/framework that we had no experience in was definitely the biggest challenge. So many stackoverflow, react dev threads, and other forums were scoured as we learned more and more throughout the day (and night).

Another pretty prominent issue we had was consistent source control where two people were coding on some shared files at different times and we would have trouble pulling from the repo without changing code on a different file or pushing code without changing what was different in the repo.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting a functional product was definitely one of the highlights of our project because we were a team of three, and none of us have any experience with mobile app development and only one team member had any experience using React. Although we were a little slow getting off the ground, we’re proud of the extremely detailed Figma workflows that showcase the functionality of our project as well as the success we had in converting some of those Figma designs into workable React Native code. Going from no experience in a language and development stack to building fundamental proof-of-concepts is something that we were able to accomplish during Dubhacks this year.

What we learned

• Learned App Development and React
• Learned how to simplify scope and focus on fundamentals. Humans have a natural tendency to overestimate what they are capable of in a certain amount of time, so being able to hold ourselves back and root ourselves into reality was an important skill.
• Learned to communicate often and clearly with team members to avoid merge conflicts with Git. We were constantly conscious of being aware of what each team member was doing, which improved our cohesiveness and effectiveness as a team.

What's next for Hi-5

• Add Location Tracking
• Back-end Incorporation (our backend designer dropped out of the competition about an hour after it started (12 pm) so we were not able to find another team member to fill the gap he left and decided to just build the functionality of the front-end as well as show off UI/UX design.
• Authorization through universities as well as medical records to track COVID vaccination status.
• Add privacy failsafes (eg. emergency contact)
• Explore Accessibility

Built With

• react-native