Shoulder Angel

You never know when someone needs to hear kind words, but the impact can be invaluable. This application allows users to send compliments while removing fear or awkwardness.

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Inspiration

Our team decided to pursue the Connectivity track with a focus on mental health, friendship, and peer-to-peer interaction. We wanted to address the pressure fostered by many social media apps to curate a seemingly perfect life, and decided to do so by creating an anonymous positivity spreading app. We built a calming, intuitive application through which users can quickly send a nice gesture to others. We were inspired by current popular apps like BeReal or Wordle, which have very simple and quick but effective interfaces, allowing users to feel fulfilled without being a huge time suck (another issue of many social medias). You never know when someone needs to hear kind words, but the impact can be invaluable. This application allows users to send compliments while removing fear or awkwardness. We chose the name “Shoulder angel” to remind the user of making good decisions and of a guardian angel watching over them, which is the feeling we hope to invoke when someone receives a kindhearted note!

What it does

Allows the website visitor to send a kind SMS message to the entered phone number after selecting a pre-determined compliment.

How we built it

We utilized Wix Velo for a front-end website to provide users with a smooth interactive experience. We then harnessed Velo's ability to incorporate 3rd party APIs and implemented Twilio's API by coding it into the backend JavaScript, allowing users to send an SMS message with specifically selected text.

Challenges we ran into

Different versions of Twilio NPM caused JavaScript not to work, and it took us a while to discover what the issue was. We were able to overcome this by comparing the demo Twilio to our code to realize it didn't work when we used the older version.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Able to complete our goal of outputting a viable product, debugging Twilio integration, producing a visually pleasing user interface, and taking advantage of each teammate's strengths!

What we learned

Integrating third-party apps into Wix and Velo has its challenges, but is very fulfilling once achieved! We learned how to use Twilio to send anonymous text messages and how to roadmap a project from concept to end result.

What's next for Shoulder Angel

Possible future steps could include sending self-affirmation messages or reminders of goals to your own phone number, which would be stored and sent at a later time as a pleasant surprise!

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