Uplift Hackathon Project

Role

UX/UI Designer, Front-End Developer

Tools Used

Pen, sticky notes, Figma, HTML, CSS and Sass

Challenges

Representing the Palm Beach Tech Women's Council, my team of 8 participated in the 3-day Palm Beach Tech Hackathon, where we were required to “Build something that benefits the community” in the form of an website or application.

According to Governor Rick Scotts Council on Homelessness annual report: “The three primary factors that contribute to homelessness in Florida: (1) lack of access to housing, (2) need for employment and income opportunities, and (3) inadequate access to health care.” Therefore, we needed to create an application that addressed all three of these issues.

Our team needed to think of ways we could use technology to help the people that are most in need of access to information. Because we wanted to build something that helped the homeless population in Palm Beach County, the questions we posed were, "How can we use technology to help fight these
issues?" and "How do we tackle the disconnect between the homeless population and the use of technology?"

We came up with an application that functions as a resource repository for Shelter, Food, Job Programs, Health, and Hygiene. However, how would those of the homeless community have access to this app?

Solution

We created a Web app would be able to be accessed where computers are made accessible to the public, such as the library. In the future, we plan to have the app accessible through kiosks placed in key locations in the community.

This web application solves the following problems:

It directly addresses the issue of the homeless community not having access to information or resources to receive the help they need.
The solution is intuitive and easy to use - simple, not overly complex.
Having the application available in a kiosk makes it easily accessible to a larger population.