NearBy Balikpapan

Overview

NearBy Balikpapan is a web platform that helps residents discover and learn about micro, small, and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan, Indonesia. It presents location-based information about local businesses to support the digital transformation of small business owners.

My Role

This was a team project, an academic initiative by Institut Teknologi Kalimantan students. I worked as the Front-End Developer and UI/UX Designer: shaping the interface design and user flows, translating them into responsive Vue components, and building the catalog, search, filtering, and business-profile pages on the client side.

Problem

Many SMEs in Balikpapan lack an easily discoverable digital presence, while residents struggle to find nearby local businesses, because the information is scattered and not centralized.

Solution

NearBy Balikpapan brings an SME catalog into a single searchable, filterable directory, with location-based discovery to surface nearby businesses, detailed business profiles, and a recommendation system. My design focus was making search feel fast and keeping the layout clear on small screens.

Features

• SME catalog with search and category filtering
• Location-based discovery of nearby businesses
• Detailed business profile pages
• Business recommendation system
• Mobile-responsive interface

Tech Stack

On the front end I used Vue 3 (Composition API) and TypeScript on Vite, with Tailwind CSS for styling and Pinia for state management. I did the interface design and user-flow prototyping before implementation.

Challenges

Aligning the design with real data from a still-evolving backend, and keeping search and filtering responsive as the number of registered businesses grows.

What I Learned

This project exercised cross-role teamwork: handing over designs that could be implemented directly, agreeing on an API contract with the backend team, and keeping UI components consistent as features kept being added.

Result

NearBy Balikpapan is live at nearbybalikpapan.com with a growing set of businesses, categories, and district coverage, and remains under active development.