Grouper

Overview

Grouper started as a conglomerate of a bunch of ideas that my friend and I had worked on before competing in LA Hacks 2026, the largest hackathon in Southern California. We had debt tracking and car organization projects that helped with several personal trips between our friends. Coming to LA Hacks, we had no idea what we were going to work on or even where we were going to sleep between hacking! However, within the first few hours of the competition while deciding what to work on, we thought, “Why not just combine our projects together?” From that thought, Grouper was born and created to serve as a centralized planning website (and soon-to-be app) that helps with group organization, debt tracking, car assignments, and itinerary planning! 

The challenge

With Grouper being a project idea started at a hackathon, the challenge we encountered was finding out how to expedite the standard design process. We had a not-so-favorable amount of time, so, obviously, we were going to have cut out some processes to ensure we had enough time to develop the project. My friend and I used whatever feedback on core features that we could gather from our friends who were attending the hackathon and all the previous feedback on features that we had received from our other friends. The main pattern that we saw amongst the research we received was the question of "What features were we going to add that make this project feasibly useful for groups?" 

Product strategy

Since Grouper was structured around the idea of two projects my friend and I had worked on, we had a good basis for thinking about what core features we were going to add to our project. However, we had to expand our scope and find a way to appeal to audiences asking why they needed a group planning website in the first place. These concerns evolved into two ideas that unified these features: group organization and itinerary planning. Groups were created as a supplement to our core features and helped form an organized collection of people such as personal friends or club members. On the other hand, itinerary planning served as the main answer to how we were going to expand our scope and what made our project useful. It added features such as sharing plans, locating destinations, car assignments, and schedule planning. 

Metrics

Our project has come a long way from being a standard hackathon project, and here’s a glimpse at some metrics to show for it! We’re planning to grow our project in the future, and this is only the beginning!

Outcome

Grouper went on to win the Figma Design track at LA Hacks because of our ideation phase and background for the project. Grouper is also an ongoing project that’s still being worked on today and is much more fleshed out than it was during LA Hacks. We went through a UI overhaul to give the website the visual identity it has today and have undergone several painstaking user experience changes to make the website as smooth and satisfying to use as possible. We added relative sizing, optimistic UI, a simplified dashboard that shows quick actions and trips, a smart navbar, feature tutorials, and easy-to-access profile editing. Grouper has 100% become a passion project, and with an app on the way and plans for marketing towards students at our university, we are excited to see where it takes us and how we can benefit more groups in the future!