Unity Safety App
A mobile app design to help women +passing feel safe and secure when out alone and feel confident within her community.”
Duration
2 weeks
Team of 3
Hiren Bip
Dana Richards
Deborah Sung
My Role
UX Researcher
UX Designer
UI Designer
Scrum Master
Methodologies
Tools
Competitive Feature Analysis, Screener Surveys, User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Persona, Feature Prioritization, Design Studio, Wireframes, Wireflows, Prototypes, Usability testing
Figma, Miro, Canva
What is the Context?
In today's world, people who identify as women can never be too careful about their safety and security - women who go out alone in the public struggle with this general concern every day. We are a team of two women and one nonbinary individual that faces the same experience. Our safety when out alone.
The Challenges
Our UX design team was presented with the challenge to explore this problem space and found it as the opportunity to design a new product solution that would help solve for women who feel unsafe and less secure. We began designing a women's personal safety native mobile app, using the iPhone as a baseline for our product implementation. We designed a community-based women's safety app called Unity. It allows users to explore recent incidents in their current location, notify their emergency contacts, and create a safe space with other users in their proximity.
Our Opportunity
We will improve the experience of personal safety for women + passing who feel unsafe when alone in public.
They struggle today due to not feeling empowered and safe within urban communities.
Research & Synthesis
The first thing we wanted to learn about before doing the research was the current market for personal safety apps by creating a competitive matrix. According to the competitive matrix, there is either an immediate danger for women, or there is just a general feeling of unsafeness for people of all ages.
Based upon these findings, we move on to brainstorm possible users we may want to interview, and then create an interview guide to either validate or invalidate these assumptions.
Screening Survey + Interviews
In order to find interviewees that fall into our target audience, we conducted a survey before beginning interviews. The criteria are:
Women or Non-binary people.
Those who have felt unsafe when out alone.
Lives in urban cities.
Those who were okay with being contacted.
A total of 45 users responded, of which 75% were female or nonbinary and 91% felt unsafe alone. Of these 45 users, 11 were qualified and felt comfortable conducting an interview with us.
User Insights
With all the data gathered from all 11 users, we used affinity mapping to synthesize it and find some key insights.
Our research led us to the following key insights:
Hyper Aware of their surroundings.
Mindful of the possible dangers and take some sort of necessary precautions to feel safe.
Have difficulty trusting strangers, however felt safe around other women.
Have had and/or heard experiences before that affect them today.
The majority of users felt a sense of community in neighborhoods they were familiar with.
After discovering these insights, we have a better understanding of how we could be more helpful in addressing the problems and in clearing the path to our persona.
Persona
Based on our research and insights, and our primary persona's frustrations, needs, and goals, our team was able to identify Samira's problem.
Samira’s Problem
Women have difficulty trusting strangers which leads them to feel insecure and more hyper-aware of their surroundings when out alone. They often use safety precautions such as carrying mace, taking a detour, or contacting a friend to get where they need to go.
Samira is often out late and feels unsafe because of the gender-based violence cases she hears about. As a woman herself, she wants to raise awareness and support other women.
How might we help Samira feel safe and secure when out alone and feel confident within her community?
Finding Solutions
With our research insights and Samira's frustration in mind, our team began the design process by connecting the insights we found to features that could help! In our research stage, we discovered users are always aware of their environment. There is a sense of awareness of potential danger. Additionally, they have experienced or heard things that affect them today. Our design features included:
Incident notification alerts of user’s current location.
Quick alert to user’s emergency contacts.
Create a Safe Space to tune in to users nearby to see for support or comfort.
With the design features in mind, we had three brainstorming sessions (design studio) and developed our ideas into mid-fidelity wireframes. We also created a wire-flow, which shows all possible features and pathways our application can offer.
Design Studio Hand Sketch
Mid-Fidelity Wireflow
Initial Usability Testing
After the mid-fidelity wireframes were ready, we created a clickable prototype and performed a usability test with four users. After our prototype was tested for usability, we discovered that there were some fundamental problems. Our overall success rate is only 50%. As a result, user #2 failed two out of three tasks and we achieved an average rating of three stars for easiness.
What we learned from our mid-fidelity usability test are:
Users are interested in the product, but is confused of app’s functionality.
Should revise and simplify our icons of navigation.
Clarify path and add indicators to give user feedback.
A way to explain our new feature “safe space” to our users.
Taking into consideration the above takeaways learned from our usability test, we developed hi-fidelity wireframes and a full-featured version of the design.
Color & Typography
As we prepare to jump into hi-fidelity, we researched colors that could create a sense of security and positivity in the Unity app. We decided on two main colors- unity blue and dawn pink. When combined, they represent harmony, unity, and safety, as well as femininity and understanding. As for Typography, we chose SF Pro Text because it is familiar to users and is easy to read.
Design Solutions
During the hi-fidelity design process, we implemented user suggestions from our mid-fidelity prototype and created a hi-fi prototype to run yet another usability test to verify that the changes worked.
1. Updated the homepage map from dark to light in order to provide better accessibility.
2. Updated the icon for notifying emergency contacts and changed the feature name from " Notify Unit" to "Notify" to provide clarity to our users.
3. Include a create profile with a verification step to provide security for users.
The Unity App
Additional Usability Testing
We also tested the usability of our clickable Hi-fidelity prototype with four users. As a result of our mid-fidelity testing results, we achieved a higher success rate in finding and accessing our design features. The average success rate improved dramatically and the average time spent on all 3 tasks decreased from 4 minutes to 1 minute.
Some key takeaway from our hi-fi usability test are:
Users rated the app is simple, useful, and easy to navigate.
Users would like to have a way to select all emergency contacts at once.
Users need a clear confirmation of notify message being sent.
Next Steps
Overall users’ are interested and found the app useful and user friendly, however there are some next steps we would like to take and our UX design team will review and refine the Unity mobile app.
Review & implement users’ recommendations from Hi-Fi usability tests.
Voice chat rooms sharing platform and to receive supports.
Voice activating with triggered keywords (discreet way) to call your designated contact or 911.
Press and Hold Panic button for possible immediate danger.
Adding audio and live recording & backup system will record audio and automatically save it in the cloud in immediate danger situations.
Implementing a search bar for users to search locations in advance.
Make this app to a personal safety app for all.