Reach

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  Landing page: three focus categories

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  Friends page: add the friends you want to keep in touch with

Inspiration

We were inspired by the challenge of maintaining connections, particularly prevalent in the height of a global pandemic and in a society where our attention is always demanded. It is clear from experience and science that increased loneliness can result in a decline of ones mental health. Ultimately, we came up with this idea to help users keep in touch and look after their mental and physical health.

What it does

Unlike most reminder, habit tracking and mental health apps, Reach allows users to add friends who they want to keep in touch with and a desired frequency of reminders. The app will then check in with them accordingly, when each time comes around, telling the user it's time to reach out to their friend. Reach's focus has three main categories: reaching out to friends, going outdoors and meditating. The categories "going outdoors" and "meditating" offer suggestions based on local weather for exercising and relaxation activities. Overall, the app creates a comforting space where the user can relieve stress and do something for themselves.

How we built it

We first sketched out our design and prototyped it in Figma, and then experimented with developing the app in Swift for iOS mobile devices. We decided to instead proceed with a web app using JavaScript, structured using HTML and styled via CSS.

Challenges we ran into

Although much time was spent developing Reach in Swift, we found that it hindered our ability to actualise the concept of the app - too much time was spent on UI and less could have been focused on creating the functionality. In a sense, we found our skillset was inadequate for creating a product that fulfilled our plans, but we overcame this by simplifying our approach.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The user interface is simple and minimises cognitive load, making the process of navigating the app seamless and natural. We managed to put forward our project and a coded prototype despite our beginner coding knowledge, advanced levels of stress and team members stuck in Costco.

What we learned

In the beginning we found ourselves a bit lost with all our ideas so we learnt to keep the scope simple and the importance of designing a clearly structured project. We also found this was a great opportunity to practice using git and working as a team.

What's next for Reach

We want to have a stats section for users to reflect on their past behaviours. We could potentially implement a point system to reward users for meeting their goals. In future, we would also look to partner with the major social media companies to be able to implement the feature within messaging apps themselves.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript