HaleMade

Support Local

With the pandemic disrupting businesses across the globe, small businesses felt its effects the most. Many small businesses closed due to workers getting sick. People started to stay home to protect themselves from the virus, and mandates decreased the number of customers that can dine in. At the same time, this leads to the rise of e-commerce in places such as Amazon, etc. Some of these businesses were long-term successes, typical mom-and-pop shops that had been fruitful for decades until the pandemic had run them out of business or had placed them near-permanent closure.

A solution to these issues would be to have a dedicated platform for only these small businesses in Hawaii to promote their businesses and encourage customers to buy locally, which is what our application plans to address. HaleMade is a mobile application serving small business owners in Hawaii, as well as customers that search for such businesses to support. Small business owners can register their business on the application and have their business reviewed and approved to be on the application by an organization responsible for dealing with business permits. If approved, they will get a page that they can customize to promote their services and can promote deals they may have for their products. Each business would have a set of tags related to the services they provide, allowing customers easier access to their information pages. On the customer side of the application, they can find these businesses using a search functionality to quickly narrow down the results. This search can be done via the tags or by location. The app provides convenience in allowing local customers to have the ability to favorite shops that they frequent or may want to look at in more detail later.

This mobile application was built using Android Studio, Firebase, and Java. I mainly focused on the Home Page, Sign in/Sign out, and Favorite Businesses functionality and page. This project was the first mobile application I developed, and our group had to research and watch YouTube videos to understand how different components would be implemented.

Besides the development of the application, we also conducted interviews to see if an application like Hale Made can rally users to support small local businesses in Hawaii. From the survey results we received from participants, we found majority thought that our application would be impactful for small local businesses, and the search functionalities provide a simple tool for users to navigate and find businesses. The survey results also provided much feedback to improve the UI, search functionalities, and future implementations. The Hale Made project was fortunate enough to also have Colleen McAluney and Brittany Montilliano, who are responsible for Shop Small Hawaii, review our application.

See our project repository here: GitHub