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“Xeal - LGBTQA+”

Creators: Kyla, Laury, and Ramiah
High School Students from Mouse Design League (DIIT) @ Academy for Conservation and the Environment
Xeal LGBTQA

About this Project:

This app was created for our LGBTQA+ community to be able to communicate with each other. It's not a dating app, more of a community app. It's safe and everyone's welcome to contribute.

Project Media

Slides

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Community Feedback:

👾 
Fun
🚀 
Innovative
🌎 
Helpful
🌈 
Great Design
💡 
Makes Me Think

Feedback from the Judges:

👏 Head of Trade & Execution Shared Services at RBC Capital Markets — Emoti-Con Judge
This app presentation highlighted some really useful features for end-users. I felt that the design choices were very smart, and would make the app easy to navigate and use for anyone who downloaded and accessed. I really liked how the presentation reflected how you envisioned people would be using the app - and where it would have a positive impact. I would have loved to have seen some more examples of the various features (for example, what would happen when you click something in the news feed? ). It would also be neat to have a rating system for the anonymous tips to see how helpful users found the information. A really thoughtful idea and solid app design!

👏 Director of Learning at Killer Snails — Emoti-Con Judge
Thanks for sharing this idea! Your presentation does a great job of showing & explaining the most important features of the app, which really helps me understand your idea and how it works! Really nice job focusing on a few specific ideas. I was curious about your process and how you developed these specific ideas -- did you conduct interviews, talk to potential users, compare existing platforms? How did you decide what should be anonymous, and what should be associated with a profile? Managing an online community and making sure it stays a positive place is a big challenge, but I love your vision for how this could be a helpful app!

👏 Director at Accenture Strategy Consulting — Emoti-Con Judge
This team has done a great job of creating a unique solution in a crowded space (there are various dating apps for affinity groups, but few specifically tailored to community engagement for affinity groups). The homepage links to great ideas for secondary pages, the design choice of icons when explained is very clear, and maybe some succinct titles on the main page could make it more user friendly to navigate for first time / new users. It would be helpful to know the source of your inspiration behind each of these "double click "pages in terms of how you prioritized these options based on interviews, best features of others apps, etc. as it's clear you have done thorough research to inform your choices. This app as it's structured also has great potential to use this same platform to expand to other affinity groups, broadening the impact that this core design can have.

👏 Teaching Artist at Pockets Change — Emoti-Con Judge
This could serve a lot of youth as a safe space to explore in order to better understand themselves, get to know their community, and to find support. The images and colors make me feel safe looking at it; great design choices. It's so refreshing to have a space to post photos without the pressure of like buttons! .... I love the quiz and am curious how you would build that out, and if you would encourage folks to take it more than once cause our answers change with our moods etc. I know I've taken personality test a number of times and getting slightly different results helps me find the place in between exact titles where I make sense to myself.

I also wonder if you continue to develop this if it would be nice to have a place where people can post or submit queer events. This way the app can encourage human connection and and in person community instead of just engagement in the digital space. That might be a harder thing to curate in a safe way, but just a thought! Great work Kyla, Laury, and Ramiah.

Feedback from the Community:

marley 👏 a Middle School Student
i love this
riri 👏 a High School Student
great idea I love it 👏🏼

Thank you for a record-breaking 14th anniversary event! Comments are officially closed until next year.