Acuity

Your AI-powered journal companion that transforms daily reflections into meaningful professional growth.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the growing emphasis on soft skills in recruitment, with many companies prioritising personality and people skills over technical expertise. Despite their importance, soft skills are often difficult to demonstrate in interviews, as candidates struggle to provide concrete examples. We wanted to create a solution that helps professionals record and reflect on moments of growth, making it easier to develop and showcase these essential skills. Our journey began with the idea of an AI interview helper, but we quickly realized there was a deeper need. Inspired by the concept of a work journal to promote reflection and self-awareness, we saw how documenting experiences helps professionals identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for growth. Acuity brings this idea into the digital space by prompting users to reflect on their experiences and providing structured support for continuous soft skill development.

What it does

Acuity helps you intentionally nurture and track your professional soft skills through guided reflection and personalised insights. Unlike traditional journals or performance reviews, Acuity creates a living portfolio of your skills, accomplishments, and growth moments, helping you build a compelling narrative for promotions, job applications, or career pivots.

Our features include:

  • Interactive Dashboard that visualises confidence levels across soft skills categories with personalised tips and quick access to recent reflections.
  • Structured Journaling System guiding meaningful reflections on soft skill experiences, allowing you to rate confidence and document outcomes.
  • Comprehensive Archive for tracking growth patterns over time with search capabilities for interview preparation.
  • AI Companion "A-Cutie" specialized in soft skills development, helping you navigate communication, leadership, teamwork, and adaptability.
  • Physical Companion Bot integrated with your user account, which reminds you to complete your daily reflection.

How we built it

In developing Acuity, we chose a name that embodies clarity and sharpness of insight—essential qualities for effective self-reflection. Our Figma design process created a soothing greyscale palette that feels both professional and approachable, while A-Cutie was designed with a friendly appearance to make professional development conversations more supportive.

Our technical stack includes:

  • NextJS + TypeScript for a robust frontend
  • Clerk for authentication
  • Tailwind CSS for responsive styling
  • Neon DB (PostgreSQL)
  • OpenAI API via BotPress for A-Cutie
  • Vercel for deployment
  • Radix-UI and ShadCN design library
  • Arduino programming with LCD screen and beeper
  • Custom self-made 3D printed casing personally designed in Fusion 360

A key achievement was customising the AI experience specifically for soft skills development, ensuring A-Cutie provides relevant, research-backed guidance tailored to professional soft skills rather than generic advice.

Challenges we ran into

Our ambition often exceeded our technical capabilities, which created some significant hurdles. Some of us had extensive experience with NextJS, which led to a steep learning curve in development. There were moments when we questioned whether we'd be able to deliver a functional product at all. As the deadline approached, the pressure intensified. There were long days filled with debugging sessions and moments of frustration when features we thought would be simple took hours to implement correctly. Several technical aspects proved particularly challenging, including developing features for the dashboard, integrating the database handling and storing the form data, displaying the data for previous entries, and deploying the website (basically everything).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the challenges, we created a professional yet inviting UI that strikes the perfect tone for personal development, making reflection feel like a meaningful ritual rather than a chore. Our team dedicated to design enabled us to produce a very aesthetically pleasing interface. Our comprehensive Figma prototype serves as both a backup and vision for the product's future, demonstrating the complete experience we envisioned. While we didn't implement every planned feature, we established a solid foundation that demonstrates our core value proposition. We successfully produced a working form feature for capturing reflections, which forms the heart of our application's functionality. Additionally, we went beyond software by creating a hardware component, offering a physical touchpoint for the reflection experience.

What we learned

This project taught us that taking action with incomplete knowledge is more valuable than perfect planning. Our detailed Figma designs both guided development and motivated us when challenges arose. We experienced how a diverse team with complementary skills can overcome individual limitations, with designers ensuring a polished prototype despite technical hurdles. This hackathon reinforced that passion is the ultimate fuel for innovation, pushing us to find solutions and persist through challenges when logic suggested scaling back.

What's next for Acuity

Looking ahead, we'll focus on refining the styling to align more faithfully with our prototype. We plan to develop mobile app integration to make reflection accessible anywhere. Additionally, we'll add more useful features, particularly data insights and visual graphs on the dashboard that transform individual entries into meaningful patterns and trends.

On the hardware side, we plan to integrate the companion bot with the A-Cutie AI specifically tailored for soft skills development and add speech recognition for natural interaction. This dedicated device helps remove distractions from phones by providing a separate space that prompts users to reflect. We also plan to increase screen size, add more custom hardware components, and incorporate camera functionality to capture visual elements of the reflection process.

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