GroupedIn

Inspiration

The inspiration for GroupedIn came from each team member's experience with finding a group in class. It's not every time we all get the chance to take classes with friends and because of this, finding a group or members for the group can be challenging. From having teammates that don't do work, to people leaving groups, and even dropping the class. All of these problems inspired us to create a product that allows us to create the team we want with the people who can help us succeed.

What it does

GroupedIn is a website that offers a service that allows students to find the right people for their group. Many times we have seen students struggle to find members to join their group, this is where GroupedIn comes in.

We provide features that allow students to post threads on their courses to connect people to others looking for groups to join. From here, students can check both group profiles and other student profiles to ensure that the people they are going to work with are competent, trustworthy, and friendly.

To enable students to check others on their credibility, we have created the “Review system” where students can rate and give a review to those they have worked with in the past and present. Moreover, to ensure that reviews are of high quality, we created the “voting” feature for reviews to ensure that students aren’t abusing the system and to ensure that reviews are honest and truthful.

How we built it

We developed a front end using the next.js framework utilizing react and tailwind with MUI components. Then we connected it to a backend server running express.js with a MySQL database. For the overall UI design of the website, we utilized Figma to run clickable prototypes whilst creating the front end.

Challenges we ran into

Our first challenge was that we ideated and planned too fast on the first day which led to miscommunications later on the first day. Next was that we all had an unclear development timeline where we all were doing different things but not aligning on our planned checkpoints which led to us going backwards a few times to align our design and code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to complete the backend system, with all the endpoints working as intended and a fully running MySQL database. We are also proud of the fact that this team was new and never worked together in previous projects but we were able to pull off a project such as this one in 3 days with cohesion and effective teamwork.

What we learned

the UI/UX designer stated that he has learned a lot when it comes to designing alongside engineers for the first time. He has learned to effectively communicate user flows and create cohesive user stories to give the engineers a clear vision of how the website will run. Furthermore, the designer also learned to create designs based on how the front-end engineers code and how they implement designs into next.js and react.js