Spotlight

Spotlight was created to make problem discovery easier for innovators and to help solve problems that make the users' lives difficult. It's a Tinder that matches engineers with problems.

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Inspiration

Two of our team's members (Marko, Keene) are part of the Grand Challenges LLC here at Georgia Tech. The premise of the course associated with the LLC is that teams will select a "grand challenge" problem in the world and work towards making a solution to said problem. However, the entire first semester of the course is just spent looking for problems. At first, it may seem that this process would be really easy, but in fact it is the opposite.

The process of problem discovery is convoluted. Students will first have to choose some arbitrary "problem space," an area in which the problem occurs. Afterwards, they will have to spend hours researching their topic on Google, and later, will have to start interviewing people familiar with the problem space for input. Along this path, many things can go wrong. The student might realize that their problem space is too budget-strapped for new solutions, or they might figure out that their problem isn't really a problem at all, or that they can't make a profitable solution. With each dead-end , they have to turn back and start from the beginning, otherwise their solution will never succeed.

Spotlight was made to address this issue. By linking entrepreneurs/innovators directly with those that actually experience the problems, the chances for miscommunication decrease and problems are much more likely to be discovered and solved.

What it does

Spotlight is like a social media that links engineers with problems.

Any user can post about problems that they observe in their own life. It is important to note that these aren't any random problems like, "can you fix my washing machine" or "why does my sink not work." Instead, these are the sort of daily recurring issues that persist in the user's life. Problems that are tedious to deal with and limit the user's lifestyle in some way. This might take the form of poor wheelchair design that results in users' legs being knocked out of their harness when the user goes over bumps. Or, it might take the form of badly automated digital medical records that require hours of doctors' time to fill out, time that could be spent saving patients' lives.

Then, other users can interact with these posts that describe the problem (called spotlights). They can ask clarifying questions in a Q&A section or directly message the user who submitted the spotlight and can save and like the spotlight. They can discover new spotlights through tags or by sorting by "new" or "popular" on the main page. Users can even get notifications if a spotlight's tag matches the user's own interest tags. This way, innovators and engineers can discover and scroll through a large set of problems to find the ones they can can make an impact with quickly.

How we built it

The desired functionality of the project listed above was most fully realized in Figma. Figma was used to flush out the UI and UX of the web app and the prototype function was used to make a user-interactable version of the web app that would emulate some of the functionality of the final web app. That final web app was not finished by the deadline, but the front end was built using javascript and the back end was built using python and firebase.

Challenges we ran into

Being 1st years, none of us had any previous experience deploying a fully functioning web app, let along one in 36 hours. As a result, a lot of time was spent learning how to navigate python, firebase, and figma instead of building the website out. Consequently, the only finished product by the deadline was the figma prototype.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The idea and concept behind the project is by far the strongest part of the project. We believe it has enough potential to consider working on it after the hackathon ends. This was also the team's first time using any UI-building software, and the figma prototype, while only a prototype, ended up feeling like it encapsulated our ideas perfectly.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to build out the back and front end of a web app. This includes learning how to make user log-on systems, link them with databases in the back end, and make UI for them in the front end. We experimented with HTML, CSS, and javascript for the front end. We also learned how to use Fimga to portray our ideas for the look and feel of a web app.

What's next for Spotlight

The future of Spotlight revolves around making the Figma prototype into reality. This requires us to integrate the front and back ends of the web app, building out the rest of the user facing UI, getting the website hosted somewhere, and tested on some users to see if the product is viable.

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