Spots

Meet Spots

Spots is a website designed to help UH Manoa students find study and social spots on-island. Students are able to create accounts with their UH credentials and add any new spots to the site, as well as browse through different spots added by different users, with each spot having a page with location information, business hours, ratings, reviews, and amenities. Students also have an advanced search and filtering page available to them when searching for the perfect new spot to visit, and they can also add spots they’ve fallen in love with to their favorites. By creating this application, we seak to create a place where students can find locations that offer great study environemnts, as well as make friends with other students to study with.

My Contributions

For the first milestone of this project, I focused on creating mockups for what we wanted some pages to look like, as well as adjusting the CSS of existing pages like signing in and signing out to match the theme that we were going for. For the second milestone, I implemented a search function that lets students find specific spots based on keywords, such as location names. I also added filtering options so students can sort spots by amenities and attributes like environemnt type (cafe, library, etc.), crowd levels, and if they were food-and-drink-friendly, and more. Using Playwright, I developed and executed end-to-end tests to ensure these features functioned in different environments. For the third milestone, I implemented a Favorites page, which lets students save and easily access their preferred study or hangout spots. This feature makes it simple for students to revisit their top-rated locations. Additionally, I performed other acceptance testing to validate that all features made a reliable user experience.

What I Learned

While working on this group project, I learned most importantly that starting early is key to meeting deadlines and making sure that code works seamlessly before submission day is important to save yourself from stress. Communication with groupmates is also important to make sure everyone is on the same page on what tasks we need to complete and how we want our application to turn out. I also learned about the importance of community feedback, as some individuals we asked to look at our application had valuable feedback to give us on how to make it better. In the end, it is the UH student community that our application was created to serve. In terms of software engineering, I learned a lot of different concepts and tools that we haven’t gone over much in-class and from coursework. I learned more about APIs and how they make user-specific functions in web applications with data brought to the front-end from the back-end, state management and changes made between application data and the user interface, and error handling.

You can find Spots’ Github Page here.