Poentry

A specialized platform catered to create and share your poems, scrapbooks, and journal entries with customization and media support.

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Inspiration

Journaling, writing poems, and especially sharing multimedia is something that we had initially thought about when we went into Hack to The Beat. We wanted a way to really personalize word editors in a creative way and share it with other people, such as adding audio/music files, videos, images, text, font customization, and fun shapes.

What it does

Poentry gives you all that you need to create a sandbox of a social platform. Add your favorite music with audio files, memes with importing images, and hot takes with the customizable word editor. To add to the UX, users can leave comments as colorful sticky notes, post to public or private(friends), scroll through a streamlined feed while still maintaining the book and paper experience, like, bookmark, and share entries for the match between the system and the real world.

How we built it

Our tech stack is React, Vite for front-end. Node.js, SQLite 3, Express, Google Auth for back-end. Figma, and Illustrator for the user experience, such as user flows, low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes, component creation, navigation and accessibility planning, and typography. We kept Nielsen's Heuristics in mind when creating this so that not only are users exploring the beautiful UI, but are also navigating through Poentry seamlessly. Visibility of system status is accompanied by the EDITOR feature, with real-time auto-save and an indicator, color coded buttons for differentiating between navigation and personalization, animations for quality of life, and searching and scrolling for easy user navigation.

Challenges we ran into

Creating this web app from the ground-up, bug-fixes, getting media to be correctly implemented and expressed, along with other features like user-input dragging and dropping. In terms of user experience, we tested it ourselves to see how we personally would navigate the app, such as utilizing our own mental models for deciding if it would be horizontal scrolling or vertical scrolling, but we loved the horizontal scroll idea since it relates to a real book experience the most.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of creating something that we truly care about and is personal to us: a blend between emotional expression, customization and social media sharing.

What we learned

We learned how to create a content platform database and implement user-friendly mental models and cognitive affordances in that same domain.

What's next for Poentry

For Poentry, we want to add video upload, ultimate functionality, more font choices for the user customization aspect, a smart-cutout algorithm for stickers from images, and more community interaction aspects.

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