Minami
Our beautiful landing page
A dashboard with all the tools at your fingertips
Tell us your mood here
Meditate - allow yourself to be calm and focused
Zensoothe - Immerse yourself in ambient sounds
Feeling good? Plant a tree! A page displaying all your planted trees
Your Board - keeps a monthly track of your moods
Minna Board! - everybody's thoughts at one place
Encourage fellow peers, anonymously!
Feeling distressed? Contact a therapist

Inspiration

This website has a special place in our hearts. It all started when one of our friends went through a challenging time with their mental health. We realized that we hadn't been as present for them as we wanted to be, and it made us truly understand the importance of having accessible virtual resources to navigate the ups and downs of life.

That's why we created this website with care 💞, as a comprehensive and holistic platform for mental health improvement 🧠 and management. We've curated practical tools like a mood tracker 📊 and meditation zone 🧘 along with links to helpful resources 🔗 plus a message board to connect with other users 🫂, all aimed at helping you through your ups and downs 📈.

We understood firsthand how tough mental health struggles can be 🍃, and we want to extend a helping hand 🫴 to everyone out there. Whether you're seeking information, coping strategies, or simply a comforting space 🎐 to find solace, we hope this website becomes a 🌟 trusted 🌟 resource for you.

What it does

The website is adorable 🧶🐈‍⬛ with an aesthetically ✨ pleasing UI, encapsulating multiple resources and features like -

Zensoothe

To immediately soothe yourself 🎐
Present on all the pages 🎶
An array of sounds on the sound sheet 🔊
Mix and match the sounds to soothe your nerves 🖤🤍

Mood log

A check-in to process your emotions 🍃
Cute logging UI 😸
- Mood board
  - To visualize emotional behavior and patterns 🧬
  - Uncomplicated representation ◾◽◾◽
  - Plant a tree every time you see an improvement 🍃
- Forest Checker
  - A growing forest-like visual to see milestones achieved 🌳
  - Plant a real tree whenever you feel an improvement 📈
  - Watch your forest grow as you improve yourself and the world 🌎

Meditation zone

Gives a chime to assist with breathing during meditation 🔔
Soothing pulsating animation to focus on 🫀

Find a Therapist

Online counseling resources to get help 🌐
Register therapist if suitable 🧸

Voice Call a therapist

To get immediate assistance 🚨
Connect with the therapist available through portals ☎️

Necessary Hotlines

Necessary hotline numbers for emergencies

Fellow Mina - A message board

Spread optimism by writing about your improvements 💗
See how others are doing via the message board 💌
Completely anonymous, because we respect your privacy 😶‍🌫️

Blog resources

Blogs to read when feeling low 📖
Featured blogs from various sources 🌊

Donate

Always an oppurtunity to give back to community

How we built it

After we came up with the idea, we thought it would be a good time to learn and explore new technologies. There was a framework we all wanted to try, NextJS 13 with appDir enabled. We thought of this as an opportunity to try and use it. So, we created an NextJS 13 appDir project, and used TailwindCSS for the styling. We maintained a github repository to store the frontend files, and used atomic commits while storing the code on github. We used Vercel to deploy it on the fly with each commit, and cloudflare to proxy the website. The web app uses serverless technologies, so there is no independent backend server.

Challenges we ran into

One of the major challenges was to ensure the inclusion of all necessary ✔️ and additional features ➕, gathering every possible resource, ensuring that none of the features were in any way misleading, etc.
Our main motto was to make the site more soothing and less overwhelming 😰, keeping in mind the theme of the hackathon. It was a tedious task to be able to come up with a suitable design ✏️ for the website and choosing a color palette 🎨 to fit the purpose.
During the hackathon 🏁, we faced several challenges that pushed us out of our comfort zone. One of the biggest difficulties was working with NextJS 13 appDir for the first time. It was quite complex 💥, and there was a lot of new material to learn in a short amount of time. The client and server components also had a lot of glitches 👾, which took us some time to work around. We also ran into problems when we discovered that NextJS 13 appDir doesn't support the preact-signal library, which meant that we had to revert the code back to React standards. This added extra work to the project, but we were determined to overcome the challenge. 🚀
Another challenge we encountered was related to deployment. Although we had an organization for our team, we couldn't deploy our project on Vercel because it required a pro plan 😔. So, we had to shift the repository to our personal account to make Vercel CI/CD work.Additionally, it was challenging 🦾 to make the UI components work seamlessly as it was tricky to use server and client components hand in hand on NextJS. But we didn't give up and worked together to find a solution. ➕
Learning how to use Clerk 🔐 was another challenge we faced during the hackathon. Although it was supposed to be easy, the learning curve proved to be a bit tricky, and it took us a lot of time to figure it out and get it to work with v13 appDir. Time management ⌚ was also an issue for us, and we had to prioritize tasks to complete the project within the given timeframe. However, despite these challenges, we were able to learn a lot from the experience, which will undoubtedly help us in future projects.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

Here are some of the awesome accomplishments of our team 🌻

Achieved all in a time crunch ⚡- We nailed it despite having just a weekend, plus staying up all night to complete the hackathon! 🏁 Our time management skills were on point, and we made every second count to deliver this 🚀
Purpose-driven ❤️ - We built a project that's close to our hearts! 💪🏼 Our solution is all about making a positive impact, and we're stoked to have created something meaningful 🌍
Learning new tools 🔧 - We learned and used a bunch of new tools like pros, in a really short time
Functional 🚀 - Despite the time crunch, our project came to life with a functional prototype that is beneficial to all 🫂

What we learned

Though we were able to complete the project almost on time ⌚ we understood how important time management is when hacking! Requirement gathering ⚒️ for our purpose was pretty challenging since we wanted to make a holistic 🫧 yet easy-to-understand and intuitive 💭 website.
The coordination 🤝 among us improved significantly, and along with it, we realized how powerful ⭐ of an impact we can make when we collaborate well.
User Experience 🧪 is always a significant part of any project, we made sure to align our thought process 📝 with the user's point of view 👀 while designing the interface - ended up experimenting and learning UX a bit more~
- P.S. It widened our creative 🖌️ horizons a lot more, and we ended up learning ⚙️ a lot about designing and prototyping features.

What's next for Minami

Kind listeners in the future can volunteer to help out those in need via Be-a-listener feature 👂
Potential to make it into a community of Minas 🧑‍🤝‍🧑🧑‍🤝‍🧑🧑‍🤝‍🧑
- Dedicated community subgroups [Students, Adults]
Features to speak directly with community members anonymously 🗣️