Ask Us

This website was created by the HACC 2023 TryRebooting team in coordination with the University of Hawaii Information Technology Services (ITS) department.

Overview

Ask Us is a web application that improves the searching effectiveness of the University of Hawaii’s Ask Us search engine, which takes in user queries and attempts to return a list of IT-related articles that may help the users resolve their IT issues. Its robust AI search engine alleviates the need to contact IT help desk representatives. It is designed especially for non-UH community members, who typically have less access to these kinds of information.

Our project home page has more details on the functionality of the application, a development guide, access to our GitHub repository, major milestones, and team contract.

My Contributions

Due to the pressing deadlines with this being our final project for ICS 314 (Software Engineering class) at UH Mānoa, our team micromanaged almost every part of the development amongst ourselves. My main contributions to this project include the user-interface and styling. We did not want to astray too far from the branding that most websites in the University of Hawai‘i systems currently have. It instills familiarity and encourages use of this helpful resource. Our goal was to make this page as accessible to users, regardless of being signed in or not. Efforts to make chat box sizes adjustable, implement a tutorial page, and decisions to have the page scroll down automatically were essential.

What I Learned

This project was a transformation of meteor-template-react, a template for quickly starting Meteor application development. I now have applied knowledge in Meteor, React, and Bootstrap 5. We also became more experienced in testing, open-source software development, coding standards, and carrying out deployment of the application for the whole world to see.

More so, I became more conscientious of my role in the UH community, and the possible value that this project could have for others. I remembered myself being in the shoes of someone who struggled to find the right resources for UH related questions. Developing a project like this requires empathy and a positive vision for the user. We are open to future improvements for this web application.