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This Teen Developed an App to Let You Sign Yearbooks in Quarantine
A conversation about the HAGS app for iOS
Among the many things that were lost in the midst of sheltering-in-place this year, one was the annual tradition of students signing each other’s yearbooks. Even if you’re not a student or the parent of a student right now, surely you remember this experience and can relate to a sense of loss about missing it. Graduating high school student and app developer Jameel Shivji took this sense of loss and turned it into an idea. Together with his sister Suraya Shivji, an engineer who graduated from college last year, Jameel created the HAGS app, available now in the app store.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
OneZero: Before you tell us about what the HAGS app does, I want to start by asking you about the name. What does it mean?
Jameel Shivji: HAGS is an acronym for “Have A Great Summer.” When fleshing out what HAGS would be, Suraya and I realized that we always wrote HAGS in our friends’ yearbooks, in elementary and high school, so we thought it’d be a fun name for the app.
You can try to simulate end-of-year celebrations with drive-by ceremonies or speeches on Zoom, but how do you replace the yearbook signature?
Our priority when creating the app was to make the feel and vibe of the users’ experience playful. The doodle icon style, along with the peach color, gives HAGS the sentimental feel of a physical yearbook, with the benefit of always having it accessible on your phone.
For you, this was personal. Tell us about that.
HAGS has been a real passion project. It started with me ranting about how I wanted to fill up my last high school yearbook because I didn’t want to miss out on that tradition. I’d expected it for four years, so I wanted to do something about it. That’s made it extra special to work on, other than the fact I got to create it while watching Zoey 101 with my sister.
This is going to make me sound very old, but what is Zoey 101?
Zoey 101’s a show from the early 2000s that was on Nickelodeon that centered around a teenage girl and her life at boarding school. My siblings and I…
