Inspiration
The elderly often face challenges associated with loneliness, approximately 50% of individuals aged over 60 are at risk of social isolation. With Timeless Ties, our mission is to create a simple website and app that will help to improve this issue. Our website considers a user's location, age, and interests, and then offers tailored meet-up suggestions with for the user to attend. We hope that Timeless ties will help to establish meaningful connections and friendships with like-minded elderly individuals at these group meet-ups.
What it does
A user will register with their name, email, age, location and interests. They are then taken to the main page of the website which will display personalised suggested meet ups. If a meet up is clicked, a large picture and more information on the meet up is displayed. A user can choose to click the large join button next to their chosen meet up. After joining, the date time and location of the meet up will be clearly displayed on an 'upcoming meet ups' page.
How we built it
We utilised a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Bootstrap to build our website. In the design phase, we used Uizard to create of app prototypes. Recognising the age of our target users, primarily comprising individuals over 65, we knew our user interface needed to be simplistic and highly accessible. To implement this we limited the website to five different pages, ensured easy navigation around the website, kept all text large and bold, included images and included meaningful colours eg. when a meet up is joined, the joined button turns green. The website also contains a help page to explain to users how to navigate the site.
Challenges we ran into
The first problem we experienced was in the design stage, when discussing the features of the website app we got carried away and planned unnecessary features that would ultimately make the website too complex for our users and decrease user experience. To fix this we took a step back and identified the key elements of the website and included only them in our design. Another issue we found was after creating each individual web page, we were unable to link the pages together. We were able to fix this issue by having all members of the team working on the problem and doing a lot of research online.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of how we worked as a team, we communicated well which made us more productive and efficient. We also did well at picking up html and the use of Flask and feel we have improved our web development skills. Overall, we are proud of the project we have produced.
What we learned
Throughout the project we realised how important communication and working together is and we were all able to improve our communication skills as a result of the hackathon. Most members of the team were new to using Flask, we were all able to pick it up extremely quickly and were able to widen our knowledge of web development.
What's next for Timeless Ties
In the future we hope that Timeless Ties would expand to other cities, currently the website only works for users in Bath which limits our possible number of users. We would also aim to fully develop Timeless Ties into an app, this would benefit users as it increases their ease of access and would also allow us to implement features such as notifications of upcoming meet ups.
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