TextSafe

Splash screen
Learning about the application
Adding a contact
Sending a text message
Home screen with content

Inspiration

As young adults, we have experienced moments where we have heard many incoming notifications as we’re driving. We could be running late for an event or keeping someone waiting on you in the rain. With nowhere to pull over and respond, we have wished for someone else to be there with us to respond.

What it does

TextSafe automates text message responses to common questions from friends and family, using the driver’s collected data., such as location and calendar.

How we built it

First, our designers created mockups of all the necessary screens the application would need to function from start to end. Our developers took those mockups and tried to replicate them in Android Studio. We also implemented a Google Maps API to pinpoint location and share ETAs. After finishing the mockups, our designers also made a full prototype demonstrating the intended functionality of the application.

Challenges we ran into

For our design team, our challenges mainly circled around the Android interface. As we were more familiar with iOS, it proved to be difficult when looking for reference photos and assets to determine which ones were accurate representations of the phone model we were emulating.

For our developers, they had not made a mobile app using Android Studio before, so it was challenging to figure out how to connect things together. Android Studio also took up a lot of space and was a bit slow to emulate when we wanted to test the code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is very proud of the growth and learning we experienced this weekend. Out of the four of us, 50% were first-time hackers! For us to be able to come up with the concept and see a functioning product is amazing.

The designers are also proud to have been able to prototype most of the pages together and be able to communicate the intentional functionality of the project.

What we learned

Our developers learned how to implement Google Maps API and develop a mobile app through Android Studio, while our designers learned how to implement overlays and create a Figma prototype for a mobile app. As a whole, our team also learned more about driving safety and how to manage a project together.

What's next for TextSafe

In the future, we hope to use machine learning in order for TextSafe to learn from the questions that it gets asked and reply with more accurate responses.