Convo, a gamification app that helps people who want to improve their communication skills, especially people with mental health issues that prevent them from connecting with others.
Interactive app: https://projects.invisionapp.com/prototype/ck6o9hjwj006o7k01qqj9bsnn/play
Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMa2z7dGK2k
On this special occasion of Valentine’s Day, members of our group blame the reason for their single status to socially awkward guys when talking to girls. “Why can’t they just learn how to communicate with us?” one complains. We soon realize that this is a social phenomenon that exists beyond love. In order to help people who want to improve their conversation skills, especially people that have mental health issues that prevent them from connecting with others, we think it would be nice to give some demo, practice, and advice through our App to reduce embarrassing and uncomfortable communications.
Convo is an app game designed to prepare users how to react in certain situations in order to keep the conversation flowing. Targeting people who consider themselves to be socially awkward, Convo prompts questions like ‘How are you’ and ask users to select their preferred answer from potential responses. It then shows the score for the choice and provides feedback.
We are all hackathon beginners and are not skillful enough to execute our idea entirely. We started with programming it on Python 3 but we have no experience with GUI to graphical our program. We came up with a prototype using a combination of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InVision tools. The demonstration is built with InVision Studio, demonstrating some key transitions between different interfaces. Some of the pictures are from the Internet, but everything else is created by the team. Although the idea was more complicated, we had to settle down with a safe and execute-able version.
As three newbies, we have no experience in IOS development and UX/UI design. We tried python, chatbot, and finally decided to show the interface using Invision. We are still trying to incorporate more functions using Google Flutter.
This is our first Hackathon, and we didn’t expect to build anything, to be honest. We are really glad that we reached out to mentor Anna, who helped us find InVision, a software easy enough for us to learn and apply in a short period of time. This is our first experience with App development, but we are really proud of what the end result we were able to pull off.
We learned how to build a product (an app) from scratch. Coming up with an idea and step by step realizing it, both our abilities and the challenges, we tried different platforms and tools, which gave us an overview of the developer environment. Most importantly, we honed our UX/UI skills through designing the app.
More detailed study/survey for more data in order to improve our question, answer, and scoring system. If we have a large enough question database and allowing users to answer only a small number of them randomly, the result would be more reliable.
We also thought about making a chatting function, where users can chat with strangers online for a short period of time. After each conversation, both parties can rate how comfortable they feel when chatting with the other, and see the score they receive. This allows users to practice applying the skills they learn from the question database and actually get better at talking to real people.
We would add a data collection process using machine learning to train the computer to tell awkward conversation from not awkward ones, further allowing users to “talk” with the app rather than selecting the options available.
We also thought about incorporating speech recognition to the game, enabling the app to give feedback on the tone and emotion as well as the content.
Most importantly that we want to train the app into a bot that can continue the conversation with users instead of just giving prompts.