Equipping students with practical tools to tackle personal safety concerns in their everyday lives.
Project in association with the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington.
My Role
UX Research : User Interviews, Qualitative Coding, Thematic Analysis, Affinity Diagramming, User Personas, Usability Testing
UX Design : Ideation, Wireframing, Prototyping, UI Design
Team
Diana Fakhoury (Design Researcher)
Katherine Swei (UX Designer)
Patricia Gomez (Researcher)
Kalpitha Jagadeesh (Lead UX Designer)
Tools
Figma
Miro
Duration
Oct 2022 – Dec 2022
(8 weeks)
A surge in criminal incidents near the University of Washington(UW) campus has left students feeling vulnerable, anxious, and fearful. This threatens to undermine the sense of security and community that UW seeks to promote.
THE PROBLEM
The arrival of Fall is usually marked by the beginning of a new school year and students across the world get geared to embark on an exciting new journey in their educational life. At the start of the school year in Fall 2022, the increase in criminal incidents being brought to the students notice through phone alerts led to widespread anxiety amongst students waking up to such news frequently and also severely impacted their ability to explore the new environment they had moved into.
“How might we enhance a sense of personal safety, and promote empowerment for diverse student populations on and off campus?”
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Safepath — A mobile application that equips students to tackle safety concerns by helping them navigate safely, find companions, alert loved ones and report concerning incidents
THE SOLUTION
Let’s dive into how I arrived at this solution
I began by understanding prevalent safety concerns, implicit student behaviors and examining effectiveness of current campus safety offerings
RESEARCH
I began by gathering information about existing crime statistics for incidents on campus and in the Seattle area at large. I also learned about existing campus safety offerings by UW and this helped me take a closer look at the various stakeholders involved through desk research. This led me to arrive at the screening criteria for interview participants.
I did this by learning from lived experiences of students, campus safety departments and the UW Police
I also interviewed the Chair of the Board of directors from one of the UW campus safety departments and also attended a town hall on campus and community safety organized by the Graduate & Professional Student Senate at UW.
To identify common areas of safety concerns and prioritize them based on severity, I facilitated an Affinity Mapping exercise
SYNTHESIZING FINDINGS
The student interviews, observations, insights from experts and the town hall shed light on several aspects that we hadn’t initially considered in terms of safety or were even completely unaware of. We had to bring in some order to all the valuable qualitative data gathered by identifying common areas of concern and prioritize them based on severity.
KEY INSIGHTS
The interviews and observations revealed that day-to-day sense of safety is of larger importance to students and they are —
Since safety is an overwhelmingly large problem space, I chose to narrow down to two specific user groups to avoid self-referential design
USER PERSONAS
Findings from the research phase, revealed a broad set of pain points and user groups closely linked to the realm of personal safety. However, focusing on a specific user group was essential to design a meaningful safety solution that doesn’t go unused like the existing campus safety resources. Therefore, to get a nuanced understanding of which target users to design for, we created three user personas :
Primary persona
International student who is new to Seattle, relies on public transport and has high paranoia when it comes to personal safety.
Secondary Persona
Student who has been born and raised in Seattle and has adopted avoidance as a means to deal with safety related concerns.
What were some opportunities we saw and which of them actually addressed the need of helping students feel safer?
IDEATION & CONCEPT TESTING
We arrived at 3 different approaches during the ideation phase as potential solutions that could address safety related concerns of our users and further went on to assess their strengths, weaknesses and feasibility.
Concept testing our ideas on our target users revealed that they preferred the solution that helped them feel safer during day-to-day navigation through specific tools to enhance personal sense of safety.
Getting started with the design!
We then laid out target goals to ensure that our team is constantly aligned on user safety needs during solution development
DESIGN GOALS
Anecdotes about everyday real world unsafe situations, emotional states and common concerns were visualized as user scenarios to inform our design
STORYBOARDS
To gain more clarity on how to translate our design goals to relevant task flows, I curated a few realistic but hypothetical scenarios based on user motivations that we had identified and translated them into storyboards to aid us in envisioning user flows and arrive at the scope of our solution.
Scenario 1 — Sending updates about whereabouts to emergency contacts
Scenario 2 — Finding a companion to work with post class
Scenario 3 — Reporting incidents to keep others informed
Each of the scenarios were then translated to a series of steps that the users would take to achieve their end goals within our app
USER FLOWS
For each of these scenarios, we then defined user flows by identifying entry points and intermediate steps that would eventually lead users to achieving their end goal. (task completion)
Flow 1 — Scheduling a companion to commute with
Flow 2 — Finding a companion in real-time
Flow 3 — Reporting an incident
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Individual scenarios were laid out as app features in a manner that is easily discoverable and perceivable when students are in alert mode during unsafe situations
Translating ideas to a more tangible outcome helped gain more clarity on solution execution
CRAZY 8’s — LOW FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
We began with a design sprint method know as Crazy 8’s in which each team member sketches out 8 quick ideas within a set time limit in order to maximize the ideas generated. We then combined the best aspects from each of the ideas to arrive at our main app flow and content.
The best aspects of each of our individual ideas were consolidated to arrive at a mid-fidelity prototype.
MID-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
USABILITY TESTING
What I learned by testing and how I reassessed my designs
We followed this up with a round of un-moderated usability testing with 5 participants — 2 in-person and 3 remote to receive feedback on our design and uncover any gaps that might exist.
We received a good mix of positive feedback and areas for improvement through the test sessions. The findings also aided our decision making process about certain design aspects that we as a team were debating. Based on our findings from the test sessions, these are some alterations we made to our prototype.
FINDINGS & ITERATION
Change 1 — Switched to a grayscale map to tone down the clutter
The former version featured an unnecessary amount of detailing on the map that made it overwhelming for users. Therefore, I switched to a grayscale map to draw focus only to the most essential information.
Change 2 — Prioritized only the most relevant information to display on the map
The home screen initially had a lot going on and left users confused. I introduced the ability to filter to make information more digestible for users.
Change 3 — Provided more clarity in terms of available Buddy routes
The lack of necessary location based details made it difficult to choose the right buddy. I redesigned the interface to highlight location and time-based details that can aid in decision making.
WHAT USERS LIKED
FINAL DESIGN
DESIGN HIGHLIGHTS
Navigate Safely
We made the main focus of our app to help users navigate safely by providing various variables that can assist them in their commute. We do so by :
Displaying incident alerts on the map
Displaying nearby friends known as ‘Buddies’ who they can commute with
Ability to check bus and ride schedules based on the start and stop destinations that they enter
In-app navigational assistance
We intend add layers to this in the future by displaying well lit paths, UW NightRide schedules and any other variables that we see fit.
Find Companions
This feature helps users find a companion, referred to as Buddy within our app, to accompany them on their commute for an enhanced sense of safety. As our research findings revealed that most users felt significantly safer when they were with someone else as opposed to being alone, we decided to make it easier for users to find a companion to commute with based on their destination and mode of commute.
Stay Connected
For an enhanced sense of safety, we incorporated a way for users to remain connected with their loved ones and provided them with the ability to send real-time updates about their current location so that they can feel safer during their commute. They can do so by adding emergency contacts and further sharing their live location and additional details about their journey.
Increase Awareness
This aspect of our app allows users to report concerning incidents that they encounter. This can increase communal awareness about unsafe occurrences and equip all users of the app with the ability to remain alert of their surroundings and choose their route to commute accordingly. These incidents will be displayed within the map once the incident has been verified by an authorizing body such as the UW safety services.
CLICKABLE PROTOTYPE
Want to get a sense of what the app would feel like? Click away!
THE WAY AHEAD
Due to the time constraints on the project, I had to reprioritize the features I chose to detail out. However, I intend to add on layers to our solution in order to ensure that it holistically caters to enhancing an added sense of safety. A few aspects I intend to incorporate are—
What’s next for SafePath?
Dabbling in the sensitive and extremely large problem space of safety highlighted some key things that helped me grow as a designer
REFLECTIONS & TAKEAWAYS
It is important to externalize ideas.
Translating ideas to more tangible forms can provide enhanced clarity and aid in faster decision making. When ideas only exist in the mind it can be hard to evaluate various aspects of it. Therefore, quickly converting ideas to more physical forms such as sketches, paper prototypes or digital interactions made it easier to assess things that work and don’t work and helped me proceed with further iterations.
It’s okay not to solve for everything at once.
Trying to device a solution for an issue as complex as safety helped me realize that it is important to prioritize the most essential features and look into adding more layers to the solution in the future. Doing otherwise might lead to devising a general solution that might not address the specific needs of the target user group.
Get feedback early on.
You don’t have to wait for a fully perfect prototype to start getting feedback. Testing ideas early can help overcome dissension within teams and help refocus attention on user needs. Often while designing products, we might tend to get caught up with our own biases of what’s important. However, receiving inputs from users can be eye-opening in terms of issues that actually matter to the user.