present Decisionspresent
Decisions Demo Video
We're giving you back control over the big picture, by colouring in some of the little ones!
How many times in your life have you spent so long trying to work out what to eat, you've ended up too hungry to cook? How often do you sit down to watch or play something, only to realise you've spent 45 minutes looking through all the options in your backlog? How often does making a decision keep you from enjoying the outcome?
We know that people live busy lives, and that decision fatigue is real. We built Decisions to help relieve some of that burden.
In Decisions, you can register an account and start creating personalised lists (e.g. 'what to cook for dinner') of options (e.g. 'soup', 'salad', 'sandwich') to be used in a decision-making process. They're linked to your account, so you can build up your options over time, and edit them whenever you need to.
You can invite other users to join groups (e.g. 'board game night') if you're collaborating on a decision, and you'll all get instant feedback (and notifications!) about any decisions you're taking part in. Decisions are made using a themed process like 'This or That', where users take turns choosing between two options until a winner is crowned. Once you've completed a decision, the result is saved to your profile.
The Team
Abby Davis (she/they)
Alexandre Izumi (he/him)
Dhiran Sodha (he/him)
James Sewter (he/him)
Wren Hawthorne (they/them)
Zeineb Mukhtar (she/her)
Technologies
We used a modified MERN stack, replacing Express.js with Koa.js and React with React Native. We utilised JavaScript and TypeScript, as well as Expo Go and socket.io.
We were interested in challenging ourselves to learn new technologies, but we wanted to make sure the tools we chose were appropriate for the project.
MongoDB allows us to handle dynamic, user-generated data; an idea very much at the heart of our design. socket.io made instant feedback and live collaboration - another core concept for the project - possible, and we decided to work in React Native and Expo Go so we could develop a cross-platform mobile-first application, since we'd all imagined using the app on our phones from the beginning anyway!
Challenges Faced
As we started to plan our project, we became increasingly excited and ambitious about all the features and functionality we envisioned for the project. We had to really challenge ourselves - and each other - to dial in the requirements for our MVP, and to make sure we could complete our project in the time we had available.
We also ended up planning to use an almost entirely unfamiliar tech stack, which at times felt a little overwhelming! We managed this as a team by having one or two specialists take the lead on spiking a technology, so everyone in the squad had several points of contact for support during development.
Thanks so much for checking out our project! Have a great day!