X-Press

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Inspiration

We are all living through the Black Lives Matter Movement, which has enabled our team and many of our peers to voice our ideas and spread awareness about various resources, petitions, and organizations regarding how we feel about the protests, riots, and overall movement. Our team has seen how many of our peers have been turning to social media to express themselves and talk about their opinions and ideas, and while they are using platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat to spread awareness, many of our peers have mentioned how these platforms can often get messy and disorganized. Many people tend to post the same resources over and over again, causing important information to get lost in a flurry of Instagram posts, and we quickly realized this was a big problem: there wasn’t a platform for teens to take action on civic movements. We thought of this idea before the hackathon began.

What it does

X-Press enables teens to become civic leaders by providing them with a plethora of resources. The app directs teens to take a quick survey when making their accounts to gauge their political beliefs and ideologies. Then, the app connects the teen with other like-minded students who can all communicate and talk about their ideas and opinions with others. Through this messaging system, teens can connect and plan projects or other endeavors together.

The app also features a page displaying numerous petitions and names of organizations that teens can sign or contribute to if they are interested in. Teens can also write and publish posts to talk about their opinions or pose a question. The app will monitor these posts to ensure there is no foul or harmful language used.

To provide unbiased information, the app will also regularly include and update many articles and news reports that write about the events happening in the nation and around the world so teens can access information related to a specific topic or cause.

The purpose of X-Press is to bring teens together and provide them with the resources, connections, and opportunities they need to not only become civically engaged, but also kickstart their own endeavors and projects to support causes they believe in.

How we built it

Our team utilized Swift and XCode to build our mobile application and utilized Canva to create the user interface layout. You can check out our UI design here.

Challenges we ran into

Two of our team members are aware of how to create websites using HTML and CSS, but no one on the team was aware of how to code a mobile application or ever made a mobile app before. We chose to use Swift and XCode because two members of the team had Mac operating software, but because we didn’t know how to code with Swift and XCode, we ran into numerous problems understanding how to format the code and identify bugs. We relied on sources like Apple’s online book titled “Intro to App Development with Swift” and “The Swift Programming Language” to refer to how to create variables, write comments, and craft functions. We also watched numerous video tutorials over the past couple of hours from Youtube channels such as Code with Chris and freeCodeCamp to understand the user interface of Swift.

Another challenge was conducting adequate user testing. We wanted to show our app to teens, conduct beta testing, and receive feedback on how we could improve the app, but due to the time constraints, we were unable to. We relied on our UI designs made on Canva to get feedback from our users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Considering that our team had absolutely no understanding or previous experience in coding a mobile app, we are incredibly proud of the app that we built in such a short amount of time! We started building the application during the actual hackathon time constraint.

One of our other major accomplishments was that we were able to get survey results from over 111 people in the past couple of hours, and this survey was vital for our team to perform market validation and ensure that our problem was valid and widespread. From our survey results, 91.2% of teen participants agreed that activism on social media was messy and unorganized, and 94.7% of teen participants claimed that they would download and use a platform like X-Press that enabled them to be civically active.

We are also proud of the UI design that we made on Canva. Although our team had used Canva before to make slide presentations, we never used it to make UI design layouts. Experimenting with Canva and making a concise UI design is one of our accomplishments because it guided us tremendously while coding the app and was also an excellent way for us to visualize what the app will look like. We created the Canva design during the actual hackathon time constraint.

Overall, over the course of these 24 hours, our team has learned so much about mobile application development and we can't wait to apply the skills we learned towards future hackathons.

What we learned

Throughout this journey, we learned so much about the coding language Swift, specifically, how to utilize Swift and make a functioning iOS app. In such a short time, our entire team learned how to navigate through the Swift interface and utilize tools like Swift Playground to experiment with the coding language and format the code correctly. Our team understood the importance of commenting out code the hard way because when we ran the code and there was an error, it was extremely difficult to find the problem and fix it.

Our team also learned a lot about creating simplistic, yet effective, UI designs. Our initial design was very busy and packed with buttons, text, and other components, but throughout the process, we worked hard to ensure that our app was easy to navigate, and users could easily find what they were looking for.

What's next for X-Press

In the next couple of days, our team will continue to code the app to include all the features we want it to, and we want to incorporate APIs such as the Google Civic Information API and US Census API to feature real-time and accurate data in our app. We are also looking forward to creating an algorithm that will assess a user's political ideology based on questions that they answer while making their account, such that the app can accurately pair them with like-minded students. We would also like to integrate a donation/funding feature.

In the future, we want to partner with websites such as change.org, such that the petitions can make a profound difference. We then want to conduct a more thorough beta testing with teens across the nation to ensure that our target market needs an app like X-Press, and hear directly from teens to see if there are any features we should add or delete. We hope to launch X-Press as a complete business venture in the next couple of months.