The problem Covid Desk - A Guide and Helper solves

The real problem that we identified is that there are many people in the country like stranded migrant workers especially, the basic necessities like food & shelter is a big problem for them. If anybody sees such people, they can immediately post that request at the Help Station stating that some migrant workers need food at street no. 56 R.K. Puram. Whoever can reach to the place as soon as possible can help the workers by providing them with the necessary supplies. Here, we follow the Diversity track of the hack. We also identified that people often read fake news from WhatsApp and other mediums and keep forwarding it hence, we provide a portal where the Govt. of India tweets about all the fake news and urges people to stop believing in it. The tweets by Health Ministry is beneficial for people working day-and-night to fight against this deadly virus, for example, police force. It also shows the WHO guidelines to help people keep themselves safe and secure. We also collaborated with Slang Labs which basically is a voice assistant on our website. It displays the confirmed cases at the district level also which proves to be a great relief for the users. It’s also beneficial for the people who have any visual deformities. Hence, the voice assistant helps to listen to the statistics in both Hindi and English. We have a chatbot on our website which checks the symptoms of COVID-19 and tells if the person needs immediate medical care or not. So, we follow the Community Awareness track as well. The website serves as a PWA which can be easily added to the home screen and can be used as a native mobile app. A portal should have an extensive user-base to reach out to maximum people, therefore our portal is completely mobile-friendly and we resort to help users by following all the norms like social distancing, working from home and making this crisis less vulnerable. We have taken care of the age groups that will be using the portal and how everyone can be benefited from it.

Challenges we ran into

We did run into hurdles while building this extensive project. The most challenging task was to reach out to the maximum part of the country, even to those who don't have access to smartphones and the latest technology. We did not know how to implement Login with Google, we had to do this to maintain the authenticity of the portal and prevent it from spamming or misuse. We googled almost everything, we learnt along the way and implemented the features on the website. That's why we kept a rule like one user can post only one help request at a time. For security purposes, we implemented Cloudflare to prevent the portal from any DDoS attacks and to prevent the server from crashing and the website works smoothly. To obviously build a portal which actually helps them is a thought which comes by putting yourselves in their shoes. So, a bigger thought process goes there to actually think and build which serves all the age groups and proves to be beneficial for them. We did not have any designer so creating the user interface was also a challenge for us. To adjust the elements across the screen to keep a user-friendly interface which also looks good to use was basically a hurdle at the start. But gradually we figured out, by trial and error and tend to keep the best possible friendly user interface. We faced a challenge of accessibility, many people find it tedious to go to the URL and type it in the search bar and therefore, we decided to build a PWA(Progressive Web App) which could serve the people easily. We did not know how to make a mobile app, so we again googled it, read articles on medium, went through the errors and successfully built it to ease out the process. We also realised that a chatbot should also be there on the website but we did not know how to make a chatbot. Hence, we found a third-party chatbot service and built the self-assessment bot and implemented on our portal. So, we took care of almost everything, tried, tested, implemented and built website.