Student App
Study Spotter - Student Web App
Leadership Project
Role
Developer & Designer
Project Duration
2 Weeks
Team
Leonille
3 Non Developers
Project Overview
Study Spotter was a project that my group created for our Leadership Class during Summer Quarter of 2024 at the University of Washington. We were given about 2-3 weeks to create anything, as long as we used the skills we learned in class.
What is Studdy Spotter?
StudySpotter was our take on a Yelp-Like application, that let's UW Students rate study spots on or near campus. These including star ratings, as well as reviews about the study spot. Study spots are broken down into different categories such as, "Quiet", "Group Study", "Food & Drink", and "Outdoors", and a few other such as WiFi, and Power Outlets. Lastly, it takes the unique aspect of Instagram, and allows students to post pictures of what the study spot looks like.
Problem
Unknown Study Spots
For our class, we were required to solve a any problem, and create a solution for it. We noticed that some students were having trouble finding study spots on campus, specifically during busy weeks such as Midterms and Finals. We came up with an App that let's students rate study spots on or near campus, and share it with other students to find the best study spots.
Solution
Yelp like App
Our solution was to create a Yelp like application that let's students rate study spots on or near campus, but with specific requirements for what Students may want to see before going to a study spot. Included also categories from on campus, to off campus such as coffee shops. Lastly, we wanted to maker sure Users can post images of the study spot.
Creation
Due to our team having no developers, other than myself, I took the lead on developing the whole project. Luckily, we still broke it down into different parts and how we would tackle such a project. We broke it down into sprints, with 2-day iterations so that we can stay on track with our project. Our process began with weekly meetings, and broke it down to designing, and defining our core functional requirements, so that we atleast a a minimum viable product.
Process 1/3
Realistic Views
For our project, we had knew we had to be realistic even though we wanted many features to be included with the Finals project. With that in mind, we wrote down all the features we wanted which were:
- Study Spot Tags, which include: WiFi, Quiet, friendly
- Study Spot Ratings 1-5
- Study Spot Reviews
- Study Spot Pictures
- Account Creation
Process 2/3
Challenges
Since I was the only developer, we did face lots of challenges and had to make some sacrifices to make sure we had a product to deliver in the end. This meant that I re-used some design elements from other projects, and used the same color scheme to make sure we had a product to deliver in the end. I decided to utilize a Tech Stack I've used before which was Vercel for Hosting, Supabase for the Database, React for the frontend, while also utilizing TailwindCSS for the styling.
Process 3/3
Outcome
In the end, we were able to deliver a product that was more user-friendly and faster than the current web application. Some of the features I updated were that locations were now clickable, and would take you to the location on Google Maps, and if a User wanted to rate a location that was already rated, they could just re-use the location that's already been rated in the database.
Conclusion
One thing I really took away from this was the trigger functions that Supabase had, which allowed me to create a trigger functions that depended on the data that was being inputted into the database. This meant that when a User was going to re-use a study spot, trigger functions would check if the study spot was already rated, and if it was, it would just re-use the data that was already in the database. This was a great learning experience for me, and I was able to learn a lot
Future
In the future, I would like to change the theme of the website, and not follow the same color scheme as the other projects I've done. I would also implement a google map's api so that users can see the location of the study spot. Lastly, I would like to implement a way for Users to delete old ratings, as well as a way for the User to view all the study spots they've rated.