It All Comes Down To Accessibility

Unhoused Web App

This web application uses an API to pull food and shelter resources and displays them to the user based on their location. It seeks to make resources more accessible to those that need them. The culminating project to Google’s year-long Tech Equity Collective Web Development Fellowship, this was a group project designed to test the cohorts skills in responsive web design and frontend engineering.

8 Weeks

4 Team Members

1 Google SWE Mentor

Problem

  1.  It is hard for unhoused individuals and families to find specific resources they need

  2. Many community members don’t know how to help

  3. There isn’t a central place to find resources to help those experiencing houselessness

Over half a million people experience homelessness on a given night in the United States. 

65% of this population resides in shelters and the remaining 

35% oftentimes resort to the streets and other habitable locations such as parks, abandoned buildings, cars, alleyways, and more. 

(White House’s State of Homelessness in America report)

Our Solutions

  1. Help those experiencing houselessness find specific resources based on what they need

  2. Provide a way for those that want to help to share resources

  3. Make resources more accessible to the public by creating a central place and search engine for finding resources

My Role

Frontend developer responsible for designing the UI and implementing local data storage for the Food Resources page, and ensuring the app’s deployment through GitHub Pages.

Agile Development

We worked in 2-week sprints, meeting weekly for sprint planning and retrospectives. This allowed us to continuously improve the project by incorporating user feedback and addressing technical debt in an iterative manner

Design Thinking and User-Centric Approach

We created user personas to understand the needs of our target audience - individuals that live on the train and primarily obtains income from donations.

Meet Nadia

hometown Brooklyn, NY

current situation lives on the train & obtains income from donations 

needs food, healthcare, shelter and income

wants a job, a home and to be happy

Technologies Used

The app was built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Vite for local development. Prettier was used to maintain code consistency, and GitHub Actions handled the CI/CD process.

Problem-Solving During Development

Challenge

The API we initially integrated for location-based food resource retrieval used zip code input to determine nearby resources. However, the results returned covered a broad geographic radius, often including irrelevant resources far from the user’s specific location. For example, a search using the zip code 11221 (Brooklyn, NY) would occasionally return resources located in New Jersey. This inconsistency diminished the app's usability, as users expected highly localized results.

Solution

To address this, we implemented a geolocation-based solution using the browser’s Geolocation API. This allowed us to dynamically retrieve the user’s precise latitude and longitude coordinates. These coordinates were then passed to the food resource API to filter results more accurately. By switching from a static zip code input to real-time geolocation, we significantly improved the relevance of displayed resources while maintaining an MVP-ready timeline. This approach also enhanced the user experience by reducing manual input and ensuring accuracy.

Let’s Circle Back to Our Problem & Objective.

1. Help those experiencing houselessness find specific resources based on what they need

2. Provide a way for those that want to help to share resources 

3. Make resources more accessible to the public by creating a central place and search engine for finding resources

The Future of Unhoused.

The elements showcased above represent the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of the application. Moving forward, there are significant opportunities to enhance both the user experience and cross-device compatibility. A key priority is redesigning the interface to ensure it is not only visually appealing but also highly accessible, adhering to best practices in inclusive design. Additionally, expanding and refining the API integration will be critical to improving the accuracy and relevance of resource discovery, ensuring the application delivers more precise and localized results to users.