Orbitfeed

Orbitfeed is a powerful, user-friendly platform designed to help teams gather, manage, and analyze feedback efficiently.

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Inspiration

In a world where user feedback is pivotal to the success of any product or service, we recognized a gap in tools that effectively bridge the gap between collecting feedback and turning it into actionable insights. Traditional feedback systems often felt clunky, inefficient, and disconnected from the actual decision-making process. Orbitfeed was inspired by the need for a smarter, more collaborative platform that could streamline feedback collection while providing meaningful, real-time insights. We aimed to create a tool that not only gathers feedback but transforms it into a catalyst for improvement.

What it does

Orbitfeed is a next-generation platform designed to revolutionize the way teams handle feedback. It enables users to effortlessly invite participants through email and collect feedback in real-time. But Orbitfeed doesn’t stop at collection; it provides robust tools for insights into user satisfaction and concerns & highlighting the key points for quick decision-making. The platform's intuitive design and real-time collaboration features ensure that every piece of feedback is captured, understood, and acted upon—turning insights into action with minimal effort.

How we built it

The heart of Orbitfeed is built on Next.js 14 and Convex. Tailwind UI and Shadcn were chosen to create a sleek, modern interface that enhances usability. The backend is powered by Convex, providing real-time data synchronization and robust query handling. For authentication, we used Github OAuth with Convex Auth.

Convex Integration

We effectively leveraged most of Convex’s capabilities to make Orbitfeed a truly real-time, interactive platform. This included implementing real-time queries and mutations for instant updates, using actions and internal functions to automate complex feedback workflows, and employing indexing for lightning-fast data retrieval. A key feature of Orbitfeed is its robust full-text search capability, which enables users to efficiently find and retrieve orbits (feedback projects) that closely match their search queries. Convex’s real-time capabilities ensures that feedback updates are instantly reflected across all users’ interfaces. This feature keeps all participants in sync without the need for manual refreshes. Convex’s built-in file storage ensured an easy and straightforward way to implement file uploads. We Integrated GitHub authentication with Convex Auth to streamline user sign-ups and logins. This approach simplifies the user experience by allowing them to use their existing GitHub credentials. This approach streamlined the user login process and provided a higher level of security, while also reducing the need for additional user management overhead.

App Anatomy (How it works)

Project Creation and Widget Setup

After creating an orbit (a feedback project), users can move on to the orbit page where they’ll see a "code" button. Clicking this button reveals the steps needed to integrate the feedback collection widget into their own website or app. The widget is set up in a few easy steps:

  1. Install the npm package with npm install orbitfeed
  2. Import the package into your project like this import { FeedbackWidget } from "orbitfeed" and provide the appropriate props. These settings can be found on the orbit page by clicking the "code" button.

This widget is the core of the feedback collection process, seamlessly embedding into websites for collecting and managing feedback. Users can also upload images with their feedback to provide additional context, enhancing the feedback process and ensuring issues are well-documented and understood.

Teams Feature

One of the standout features of the app is the Teams functionality, which is accessible for a one-time fee. This unlocks the ability to invite other users to collaborate on an orbit. Within a team, users can assign roles—editor or viewer.

  • Editors have more control: they can delete feedback, as well as mark it as pending or resolved.
  • Viewers are limited to viewing feedback without making changes.

The ability to move orbits into teams fosters collaboration and allows feedback to be addressed more efficiently in larger organizations.

Activity Feed

Each orbit within a team comes equipped with an activity feed that tracks the actions taken by team members. Whether someone deletes feedback or marks it as resolved or pending, these actions are displayed on the right side of the orbit page. This feature is crucial for keeping everyone on the same page and understanding the progress being made.

AI-Powered Sentiment Analysis

We also integrated AI for sentiment analysis, providing users with additional insights into their feedback. Once a week, the AI can analyze feedback, generate sentiments (positive, negative, or neutral), and offer suggestions for improvement. This feature brings extra value to teams by helping them prioritize feedback and make data-driven decisions.

Challenges we ran into

My teammate Elousia and I ran into a challenge when designing the user interface to be both intuitive and powerful. Balancing the need for advanced features with a clean, easy-to-navigate interface was more difficult than anticipated. Ensuring that users could access complex functionalities without feeling overwhelmed required multiple iterations and proper planning.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are particularly proud of how we integrated real-time capabilities into Orbitfeed without needing to write a lot of complex, custom code. Thanks to Convex, we were able to implement real-time data updates and synchronization efficiently, allowing use to focus more on enhancing the user experience rather than getting bogged down in backend complexity. This streamlined approach not only saved us time but also ensured that our app remains scalable and responsive as it grows.

What we learned

Developing Orbitfeed taught us the importance of creating a balance between powerful backend capabilities and a user-friendly interface. While sophisticated technology is essential, ensuring that the end product is accessible and easy to use is equally important. Thankfully, Convex makes this easy. We also

What's next for Orbitfeed

Looking ahead, we envision integrating Orbitfeed with leading project management tools, allowing for seamless transitions from feedback collection to task assignment and execution. Additionally, we are exploring the development of multilingual support, making Orbitfeed a versatile tool for global teams. As this app continues to evolve, our goal is to make Orbitfeed the go-to platform for feedback-driven growth.

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