The problem InstaPrint solves

Our portal attempts to decrease the amount of time a student tends to invest in waiting in queues at the photocopy shop. The student simply places an order and receives a notification when the order is ready for pickup. This helps them avoid the hassle of ordering and waiting especially during exam season.

The shop owner is able to increase his profit in many ways by this app. The stationery recommendations in the cart help to increase the size of the order thus boosting the sales. Increased effeciency of orders also increases the number of customers for the shop.
The owner is also able to keep track of the orders, transaction details and the revenue generated in the app itself by the help of monthly and weekly statistics displayed in the admin portal.

A lot of students face the problem of notes getting lost in the sea of messages in various WhatsApp groups. This app will also solve the problem of students being able to find the notes in one place itself which they can also get printed straightaway without the struggle of having to share the notes with the photocopy shop. This even prevents privacy issues the students may have while logging their account into the computer at the shop to obtain the prints.

The teachers will also have an easy way to upload the notes in the same place to avoid any and all confusion regarding what all topics have been covered in the lectures.

Challenges we ran into

Being freshers, we didn't have any previous knowledge of how to work with UI-UX. We learnt it from scratch over the last couple of days which was a great experience to go through with all the other teammates. We also explored the various features of canva. We ran into many snags during the process and solved our doubts with the help of youtube videos and hit and trials.

We then had some trouble creating a good logo which went with our dark holographic theme but we were eventually able to find a website (IconScout) which allowed us to create our logo with customisations.

Our next challenge was to work out the various templates of our app design which also had to match the theme, be visually appealing as well as user friendly. We tried various combinations of colours and buttons while keeping in mind the information architecture techniques we had recently learnt.

Being new at Figma, we hadn't quite learnt the art of prototyping properly and it took us a while to figure it out. We asked a peer to guide us with the same. We later realised that the templates linked together should be kept closer in a manner that the linking arrows didn't confuse us when we tried to edit it. This was a takeaway for us for the next project we build.

We were also able to learn how to work together as a team in such a way that we could use each person's strong suit to our advantage in the given tight time constraint of the hackathon to make our progress quick enough.