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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.

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RESEARCH

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I began by understanding prevalent safety concerns, implicit student behaviors and examining effectiveness of current campus safety offerings

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I then led on identifying common areas of safety concerns and prioritized them based on severity.

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KEY INSIGHTS

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The interviews and observations revealed that day-to-day sense of safety is of larger importance to students and they are —

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[Insight 1,2,3]

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Since safety is an overwhelmingly large problem space, I chose to narrow down to two specific user groups to avoid self-referential design.

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TARGET AUDIENCE

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Primary persona

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International student who is new to Seattle, relies on public transport and has high paranoia when it comes to personal safety.

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Secondary Persona

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Student who has been born and raised in Seattle and has adopted avoidance as a means to deal with safety related concerns.

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IDEATION & CONCEPT TESTING

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What were some opportunities we saw and which of them actually addressed the need of helping students feel safer?

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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.

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DESIGN GOALS/PRINCIPLES

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We then laid out target goals to ensure that our team is constantly aligned on user safety needs during solution development

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[3 Goals]

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STORYBOARDS

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Anecdotes about everyday real world unsafe situations, emotional states and common concerns were visualized as user scenarios to inform our design

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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

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USER FLOWS

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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

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Flow 1 — Scheduling a companion to commute with

Flow 2 — Finding a companion in real-time

Flow 3 — Reporting an incident

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INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

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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

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CRAZY 8’s — LOW FIDELITY PROTOTYPE

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Translating ideas to a more tangible outcome helped gain more clarity on solution execution

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[IMAGE]

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MID-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE

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[IMAGE]

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USABILITY TESTING

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What I learned by testing and how I reassessed my designs

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FINDINGS & ITERATION

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Change 1 — Switched to a grayscale map to tone down the clutter

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Change 2 — Prioritized only the most relevant information to display on the map

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Change 3 — Provided more clarity in terms of available Buddy routes

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WHAT USERS LIKED

[IMAGE]

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What does success look like?

Dabbling in the sensitive and extremely large problem space of safety highlighted some key things that helped me grow as a designer

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1. 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.
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2. 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.
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3. 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.

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