Link to submission with screenshots
Pathfinder enables foreign born immigrants to quickly find out about services near them. These services are identified by recommendations from other people with similar backgrounds. Pathfinder also enables the discovery of services for all individuals including those weaker literary skills.
GlobalHack7 provided multiple opportunities to meet and talk to foreign born individuals and those who work with the immigrant community. Through those conversations, we learned that locating nearby services that can accommodate them and their specific needs is a major challenge, and that there is a substantial amount of weight placed on recommendations from others that share a given national background.
Pathfinder allows immigrants to view the world around them with a lens provided by a community of others with the same national background. We strongly leveraged iconography and visual queues to enable access for all individuals regardless of linguistic background and (as much as possible) literacy.
We used Vue.js for the mobile application. The mobile application is styled with Material design components. A backend API was built in GoLang to enable pulling live data from Google Places and Maps API.
Most of our challenges were related to working with the free/public data that the Google APIs provide. Once we got it working, it was an incredible feeling to see live data breathing life into our app.
We think our app can be used effectively by those with any language background, and even individuals who are very weak in literacy. This intentionally inclusive design is something we're extremely proud of.
Effective scoping is key, and team communication can make or break a project. Fortunately, we all work and communicate very well as team members and we couldn't be happier with the outcome.
We reached all of our minimum goals, and also all of our stretch goals. We are ready to show our app to the community and get feedback on what directions we could take it going forward.