Habbit is a mobile application that I developed with 3 other university students as a part of She Hacks 2021. We had 36 hours to come up with our idea, design the prototype on figma and implement the code which we did using React Native.
Inspiration
Originally inspired by the Hobbit, this app was meant to bridge the financial literacy gap that exists for young girls through a mystical and adventurous platform that is both educational and fully interactive. We hope to inspire our users to build the lifelong habit of financial planning! As a group of women who received no formal education on personal finance, we were also inspired by our own experience and hoped to develop an app that bridged this disconnect for female youth, making financial literacy accessible and commonplace.
What it does
Habbit acts as both an educational app and a personalized income tracker that teaches young girls about saving and spending. Users stay involved through tracking their daily expenses and earnings while also learning about money basics, budgeting and trivia. Using their newfound financial awareness, young girls are empowered to thoughtfully exercise their financial independence and make wiser and better-informed spending choices.
How we built it + Challenges we ran into
Our team used Figma for front end development, creating a detailed prototype of our app that showcased its UI and UX elements. We then built the app in Visual Studio, translating our original Figma design to code and successfully achieving working functionality.All of the graphics for the app were hand-drawn in Photoshop, including the logo, icons, dragon avatar and background assets. Our team drew inspiration from the illustrations in The Hobbit novel, a childhood favourite, to create an engaging and child-friendly design.
No members of the group had experience with Visual Studio or React Native, and so we were challenged to code with a language and platform that we were completely unfamiliar with! This encouraged our team to step beyond our comfort zone and learn and adapt to the new software in a time-efficient manner. Whether it be through Youtube videos or digital manuals, we were challenged to take initiative and independently educate ourselves on the operation of this high-level platform. In terms of our design, we had trouble transferring our outline on Figma into Visual Studio as our limited knowledge of the software prevented us from implementing complex graphics within the app. This caused us to adopt a pragmatic mindset, realistically adjusting our plan based on our digital capabilities while also not losing track of the app’s main focus.
Learnings + Accomplishments
Creating Habbit was a challenging yet highly enriching and rewarding experience that forced us to stretch our limits and experiment with new apps like Figma and VisualStudio within a time-sensitive project-based environment. Through this process we learned how to translate desired features of our app into code, rapidly increasing our understanding of Visual Studio and React Native. Furthermore, in terms of design, this was also our first-time using Figma. Once again, we learned how to work on a new platform through creating animations and graphics for our final product. Two of our proudest accomplishments include; our hand-drawn avatar and icons as well as our successful use of Visual Studio despite not knowing React Native!
What's next for Habbit?
If given more time, our future iterations would include the following:
Implementing the option to have a parental supervisor on the youth’s account. This would involve adding a parental view of the app as well as specific features such as a pin code and verification techniques.
Adding short-term and long-term item goals which the user can set aside savings for along with a progress tracker for these goals.
Creating a points system for completing educational lessons and reaching financial goals. This would help gamify the platform and motivate usage.
Increase customization of tasks and rewards to provide more flexibility to users wanting to build their own plans.
