Submission for SBHacks V Akhil Arun, Andreas Bigger, Bryan Huang, Ralph Sun
SnapVote - voice your opinions!
As college students, we are almost always debating topics like which restaurant to go to, political views, which song to play or late-night philosophical arguments. We were interested in exploring how we can engage this discourse with simple, fun, and interactive data visualizations.
Nowadays, almost everyone has a Snapchat account. We wanted to use the snap kit because it's a fun and visually accessible way for college students to use an existing account to join in on the discourse on the college campus.
The user logs in through their snapchat account, allowing us to access their bitmoji, a fun and easy way to access a avatar / profile picture. The user can join in on hot live discussions with questions like "Will the Golden State Warriors win the playoffs?" or "Are tech jobs oversaturated?", with the avatars moving to different sides of the arguments live. You can quickly see what sides your friends are in with the avatars.
We built the front end in React.js. We wanted to make the experience logging through Snapchat and participating in discussion fluid and simple. We focused on the UI/UX design of the website, styling the site after Snap's User Interface and making it DEAD simple.
We employed Google Cloud Platform to host the site. Finding a domain name that was memorable and useful was also really easy through domain.com. We were able to snag snap-vote.com!
Our main component was the snap kit SDK. With almost every college student on Snapchat, we leveraged this to
Some challenges we approached was the relatively new and limited snap kit. Unfortunately, the support for web applications was rather limited with Snapchat integration and there wasn't too much documentation on how to approach those limitations.
We are all freshmen and beginner hackathoners. These days, almost everyone is on Snapchat. We wanted to take advantage of this platform to reach a large college population and make a really visually appealing way to engage in college discourse. Despite having little experience in React and web applications, we were able to learn React, GCP, and various API's that serves to engage diverse ideas and opinions to help people grow on the college campus.
We learned so much react.js and how to make engaging products that people would use. Crafting an addicting user experience from allowing for Snapchat login that most have to intuitive design, we were able to figure out how people engage in discussion. We have so many great ideas on where this could go.
We are interested in adding more features to make the discourse a bit more interesting. Similar to reddit, we want to make a discussion forum and add upvote/downvote buttons. This would make the most popular ideas and opinions float to the top, however we also want to add features like Controversial and New to see different ideas and opinions.
- html
- css
- scss
- react
- git
- Google Cloud Platform
- domain.com domain name and 1 year of domain privacy
- snap kit SDK OAuth
- snap kit bitmoji library
- heroku
- firebase