Hive

Inspiration

In the midst of COVID-19, staying connected with friends, family, and loved ones is harder than ever. It might be your first instinct to mention social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat in order to alleviate the pain of isolation, but each of these platforms present issues of their own. Social media has very much become a place of judgement and public image in the recent years and it makes it difficult for people to feel connected even with the tools that we have access to now. It's common for people to feel post anxiety in fear of what other people might think of them and this makes it extremely difficult for friends to connect on a more personal basis through these platforms. This is where hive comes in. hive is a social media app that gamifies an intimate platform to connect to your closest friends.

What it does

Users will create a hive with some of their closest friends where they stay connected through the format of sending ~30 second video clips or photos to each other about whatever they like! You can think of it as like a private vlog/ camera roll for just you and your friends. You and your friends work together to stay connected by sending each other fun snippets from your daily life or whatever else you and your closest friends might bond over. The game aspect come within the form of filling up your hive honey jar meter. Every time a video is sent to the hiVe a certain amount of honey fills up the jar. When the jar fills up, the app will create a gallery recap of all of the most exciting moments that were sent in the process of filling up the jar. The rules are simple, have fun, laugh with your friends, and stay connected with the hive.

How we built it

From the start, we recognized that the beauty of our idea does not lie in any innovative technology, but rather the captivating and authentic user experience like we have never seen before. We meticulously discussed things like accessibility, user flow, and usability when creating the wireframe. We spent majority of our time in Figma bringing our vision to life. In addition, we wanted to create an MVP, web app, to show a proof of concept and get a better understanding of how the app would be made if it were to be done for mobile as we originally intended. We decided to use the Streamlit framework for the frontend because it works well for fast prototyping and we were familiar with Python. Also, we looked into how we might use Firebase for the backend, but we did not get much of a chance to work with it in our code base.

Challenges we ran into

The development in Streamlit went particularly slow because we did not have much experience with web dev and this new unfamiliar framework. With the time we had, most of our time coding was spent learning about how Streamlit works and then implementing a couple rough frontend components. At the start we were unsure of what framework to work with and we actually spent a lot of time trying to figure out React Native only to decide that making something substantial was unfeasible within the timeframe.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The development in Streamlit went particularly slow because we did not have much experience with web dev and this new unfamiliar framework. With the time we had, most of our time coding was spent learning about how Streamlit works and then implementing a couple rough frontend components. At the start we were unsure of what framework to work with and we actually spent a lot of time trying to figure out React Native only to decide that making something substantial was unfeasible within the timeframe.

What we learned

We learned how to use Figma, Streamlit, and a little bit of both, React Native and Firebase. In the past 36 hours we maximized our time and picked up familiarity with a lot of new platforms that we knew nothing about just 36 hours before. We spent 80% of our development process reading documentation and I hope that it is a skill we continue to use and improve upon on our future projects. We also learned a lot about the process of making subtle but meaningful decisions in the process of working on Figma.

What's next for Hive

We really believe in the app and we plan to continue to develop Hive in the months to come. Without the time restraints this time around we would like to properly implement a working mobile app (maybe in React???) and even release it in the app store.

Built With

• figma
• streamlit