PROJECT SUMMARY
While there are many resources that can be used to aid in choosing a name, most lacked the features that were most important to me. For that reason, I made my own app that filters through a name database according to factors that I found most important when choosing a name (Mr. Shelden, you know what I'm talking about). The result was a minimalistic app that filters according to three factors and can be used repeatedly to find a good name.
WHY?
Resources to choose names typically lack useful options such as the ability to filter by the first letter of the name. They also often lack a "gender neutral" option. My app is built as a tool to filter names from a database specifically according to gender (masculine, feminine and neutral), rarity and first letter.
HOW?
The app was made using code.org. I found a database online that featured a list of names ordered by their rarity and with the percent of people with that name that are male and female. Using this data and doing some calculations, I was able to create the filters used in the app. Once that was done, I just needed to work on the UI to make it simple, obvious and errorless.
WHAT?
The resulting app is decent at its stated goal. The most interesting and (in my experience) unique feature, the ability to explicitly filter by rarity is built in to the dataset since it's ordered by frequency. The app calculates whether the gender of a name by comparing the percentage of people with that name that are male and female and filters the list by that and the first letter of the name. Overall, the result is decently useful, though lacking some features.
SO WHAT?
My results informed me specifically about what people value when choosing names and more generally about how to create a good user experience. I learned that the amount of time it takes for a user to get a desired result from a program is very important to their overall experience.
WHAT'S NEXT?
I could have added more features, such as the ability to filter by name length and having a more robust system for filtering by the letters in the name (not just the first one). Another important feature missing is the ability to choose a name database to use depending on your location (i.e: using a name database from your region/country). However, I was unable to find large databases with the information needed for my app that use data from outside of the US.
Link to the video:
REFERENCES & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I got the data from data.world but I lost the link and I can't find it anymore
JUDGES FEEDBACK
Certainly, you pick a topic where I have not seen lots of resources built. Getting help with names. I am sure people will benefit getting help when looking for babies' names. It is a resource that can be developed and added to app stores. I am sure you will get lots of download requests speciallhy if you are able to add more features ( meanings of the names, the culture behind the names)