Samantha Yeung (IDEA Grad 2025) and team win first place in Community & Connection Track and Best Design Award at nwHacks 2024 for an anonymous social journaling app
Samantha Yeung (IDEA Grad 2025) had the opportunity to participate in nwHacks, Western Canada's largest 24-hour hackathon, last month. Her team (Robbie Laughlen, Franklin Ma and Alvicorn Tsang) won first place in the Community and Connection Track and Best Design Award of nwHacks 2024.
nwHacks is Western Canada’s Largest Hackathon held January 20 - 21, 2024 at UBC.
Samantha worked on the research, user experience and interface design, and presentation for yapyap. UI illustrations and some icons were created in Adobe Illustrator, and the wireframes and high-fidelity prototype were all done in Figma.
Check out this story!
About the project:
yapyap is an anonymous social journaling app that allows users to freely share their daily thoughts and receive support from others without fear of judgment. From overcoming initial doubts about joining a hackathon as a designer to making it out alive on the other side, I am particularly proud to have used the valuable UX and design thinking skills I learned from my program to create a user-friendly product and tell a compelling story.
“I am beyond excited to share that among 700+ hackers and 150+ submitted projects, our team secured first place in the Community & Connection track and received the Best Design Award! 🤓🎉
I am incredibly grateful for my team members' persistence and tenacity in overcoming the numerous challenges we faced. Shoutout to Franklin Ma for zooming back on an Uber, Robbie Laughlen for not crying of stage fright, and Alvin Tsang for carrying my backpack for me as we rushed to present at the closing ceremony. It was as much of an enjoyable weekend as it was a gruelling one, but it was a pleasure to have spent it with you guys.
Special thanks to all the organizers and volunteers at nwPlus, sponsors, and judges who contributed to making the weekend eventful, as well as to all the hackers for their amazing creations! Until next time 👋”
Inspiration
Whether you’re thriving in life or really going through it, research shows that writing down your thoughts throughout the day has many benefits. We wanted to add a social element to this valuable habit and build a sense of community through sharing and acknowledging each other’s feelings. However, even on the internet, we've noticed that it is difficult for people to be vulnerable for fear of judgement, criticism, or rejection.
Thus, we centred our problem around this challenge and asked the question: How might we create a sense of community and connection among journalers without compromising their sense of safety and authenticity when sharing their thoughts?
What it does
With Yapyap, you can write daily journal entries and share them anonymously with the public. Before posting, our AI model analyzes your written entry and provides you with an emotion, helping to label and acknowledge your feelings.
Once your thoughts are out in the world, you can see how other people's days are going too and offer mutual support and encouragement through post reactions.
Then, the next day comes, and the cycle repeats.
How we built it
After careful consideration, we recognized that most users of our app would favour a mobile version as it is more versatile and accessible throughout the day. We used Figma to create an interesting and interactive design before implementing it in React Native. On the backend, we created an API using AWS Lambda and API Gateway to read and modify our MongoDB database. As a bonus, we prepared a sentimental analyzer using Tensorflow that could predict the overall mood of the written entry.
Challenges we ran into
Learning new technologies and figuring out how to deploy our app so that they could all communicate were huge challenges for us.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Being able to apply what we learned about the new technologies in an efficient and collaborative way. We're also proud of getting a Bidirectional RNN for sentiment analysis ready in a few hours!
What we learned
How to easily deal with merge conflicts, what it's like developing software as a group, and overall just knowing how to have fun even when you're pulling an all-nighter!
What's next for yapyap
More personable AI Chatbots, and more emotions available for analysis!
Built With
amazon-web-services
expo.io
figma
github
mongodb
python
react-native
tensorflow
Try it out
For more on Samantha:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/samantha-yeung-profile/
Behance: behance.net/bysamanthayeung
Instagram: instagram.com/bysamanthayeung